I was taught (many years ago) the common misconception that fitting the linearized form of the Eyring equation overstates the error in the intercept because on a 1/T axis, the intercept is at infinite temperature, and the intercept is far from the real data. While researching various methods of data fitting, I stumbled across this great article from the New Journal of Chemistry (New J.
Early in 2009, Christopher Cummins’ group at MIT reported (in Science) the synthesis of AsP3, a compound that had never been isolated at room temperature. Later that year, a full article was published in JACS comparing the properties and reactivity of AsP3 to those of its molecular cousins, P4 and As4. The longer article is full of possibilities for discussion in inorganic chemistry courses, with topics including periodic trends, NMR, vibrational spectroscopy, electrochemistry, molecular orbital theory, and coordination chemistry.
This is a website which links to a wide variety of good quality YouTube mini-lectures on basic topics in chemistry, mathematics, physics and a variety of other sciences. Each video is about 10 minutes long and many go through example problems slowly and completely.
I read about these new biology examples for intro chem in a recent Association for Women in Science (AWIS) Washington Wire (December 2009, Issue II). Professor Catherine Drennan from MIT and her colleagues introduced "examples of biological and medical topics that demonstrate chemistry principles into her introductory chemistry lectures to highlight the connection between the fields of biology and medicine, that students often love, and chemistry." Their assessment showed that the examples increased student satisfaction with the course.
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
House (Inorganic chemistry): The book is divided into 5 parts: first, an introductory section on atomic structure, symmetry, and bonding; second, ionic bonding and solids; third, acids, bases and nonaqueous solvents; fourth, descriptive chemistry; and fifth, coordination chemistry. The first three sections are short, 2-4 chapters each, while the descriptive section (five chapters) and coordination chemistry section (seven chapters covering ligand field theory, spectroscopy, synthesis and reaction chemistry, organometallics, and bioinorganic chemistry.) are longer. Each chapter includes
Miessler and Tarr is an inorganic textbook which is is best suited to an upper-division one-semester inorganic course, though there is more material than can be covered in a single semester, so some choice of topics is necessary. It is very well suited for a course oriented around structure, bonding, and reaction chemistry of transition metal compounds, but is very limited in its treatment of solids, main-group, descriptive chemistry, and bioinorganic. Pchem would be helpful but is not necessary. In particular, the treatment of MO theory is very in-depth. The quality of end-of chapter p