This website provides access to many formulations of the periodic table over time. I think that looking at the various representations of the table would provide an excellent way to discuss periodic trends.
This list was compiled by Mark R. Leach and is part of his free resource, The Chemogenesis web book.
I usually do not take time in my inorganic course to teach students about how to name coordination complexes. And yet, I would like them to know nomenclature to the extent that they can correctly name various complexes in their lab reports or understand the naming conventions used in the literature. Often, there is a section in their textbook that I can refer them to. However, this year, I am using Housecroft and Sharpe, and I could not find the appropriate sections in the text. So, I found some online resources to refer my students to.
The Interdisciplinary Education Group at the University of Wisconsin Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) has a fabulous website with a wide variety of great resources for teaching about materials and the nanoworld at all levels. A favorite "corner" of this website that I refer to a lot in my own teaching is the library of so-called Resource Slides on a variety of topics. These Resource Slides are divided up into 36 topical Slide Shows and include wonderful graphics to use in class presentations. Slide Shows include:
This is a resource that focuses on the elements from a geological perspective. What I like about the website is that it provides examples of the uses and sources of elements.
In this open-ended activity, students design crystallizations to can see who can grow the biggest crystals of their colorful products. This addition is something that I add to the standard M(acac)3 syntheses that many of us do as an introductory lab in an upper level course or as a final lab in an introductory type course. Syntheses of the M(acac)3 starting materials are available in most published inorganic laboratory manuals.
This is my all time favorite resource for finding out basic information about the elements. I love it. And all of my students do too.
To allow students to become familiar with the structure of chemical literature and provide them with an understanding of several types of basic handbooks.
This web site contains a number of interactive spreadsheets, most of which are applicable to inorganic chemistry (or a physical chemistry class that uses inorganic examples). Here's the list of the most relevant for most inorganic classes:
ABC kinetics - interactively plot concentration versus reaction extent for A, B and C in A -> B -> C by varying k values
This is a handout which I use in an advanced general chemistry course, but which could be used in an inorganic course as well. It is a mini-periodic table with common cations and their charge to size ratios expressed as Q/r2, where Q is in integer charges (+1, +2), and r is in Angstroms. Conveniently, Na+ is an easy to remember 1.0, and Al3+ and Be2+ are easy to remember values of 10. This corresponds to the polarizing power of these ions, and is a crude proxy for how covalent their interactions with a given anion tend to be.
This assignment will orient new students to searching and finding chemical literature and effectively citing said literature. The library session focuses on the semantics of the ACS style, overviews appropriate indexing/searching tools, and has students search and find two citations for a future lab assignment for their chemistry class.