ChemTube3D is a website maintained by the University of Liverpool that has interactive 3D animations ans structures. The content is broken up into several areas:
There is a lot of information on the site, and the information could be used in many courses. The areas that I find most useful in my sophomore-level inorganic chemistry course.
For many years I have resisted using clickers, mainly because at our university there is no standard universal clicker. I wanted to keep student costs as low as possible but also desired the type of live feedback during a lecture that clicker questions can provide. In both my general chem. (200-300 students) and upper division courses (50-75 students), I now pass out 4 or 5 colored notecards on the first day of class and make sure everyone has one of each color.
A really nice site with several lattice structures indexed by several methods, and new structures are continuously being added. I find it useful for getting images for problems sets and exams.
This paper from Chemistry: A European Journal by Manolis Manos and Mercouri Kanatzidis (link provided below in Web Resources) describes the ion-exchange chemistry of a layered sulfide (KMS-1) that exhibits an enhanced preference for soft metal cations (Cd2+, Pb2+, and Hg2+) replacing K+ in between the metal sulfide layers of KMS-1. Not only does this paper provide a practical application of hard-soft acid-base theory (HSAB), but it provides an accessible introduction to the technical literature for undergraduates, par
I designed this lab experiment to introduce students to the uses of powder X-ray diffraction in the context of the synthesis of a technologically relevant material. Zinc oxide nanoparticles can be synthesized readily with reagents that are inexpensive and relatively benign with regard to student use and waste disposal. Two experiments described in J. Chem.
This paper, while not fundamentally groundbreaking, serves as a nice introduction to the field of mesoporous materials. I like that it covers synthesis, characterization, and an application of the materials. I have used this paper in our senior seminar course as the basis for discussion of this area of chemistry. Discussion questions cover aspects of sol-gel chemistry, powder diffraction, gas adsorption, IR, solid state NMR, UV-Vis, and catalysis.
This communication from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc.
JMol site http://firstyear.chem.usyd.edu.au/calculators/solid_state.shtml how common inorganic structures are built from the filling of interstitial sites in CCP and HCP lattices.
The site is used as post-work for a hands-on lab about packing (http://firstyear.chem.usyd.edu.au/LabManual/E12.pdf).