The University of Oklahoma has put together a nice website on Crystallography which includes a standard introduction to crystallography & crystal symmetry. I also like some of the features that you don't normally come across including evaluating crystal structures and twinning.
At the end of my inorganic course, I teach several "cool" spectroscopic techniques that inorganic chemists use. These techniques are discussed within the context of bioinorganic chemistry, and I typically cover EXAFS/XANES, X-ray crystallography, EPR and Mössbauer.
This website introduces (or reviews) Fourier Transforms in a neat graphical way, but most importantly, illustrates the phase problem. Given the intensities from your crystal and the phases from your model, the phases are more important! Which is too bad, as we don't have ready access to that information.
When teaching reactions and mechanisms of inorganic complexes, I tend to get to the end of the chapter (out of breath) and find myself thinking "*$#&, I forgot about electron transfer". While I think it is important that students get an understanding of this in an upper level inorganic course, I simply don't have, or forgot to budget the time to really talk about it.
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.
At the end of my inorganic course, I teach several "cool" analytical techniques that inorganic chemists use. These techniques are discussed within the context of bioinorganic chemistry, and I typically cover EXAFS/XANES, X-ray crystallography, EPR and Mössbauer. I provide this website to the students as supplemental reading material for X-ray crystallography, which is not typically covered in depth in an introductory inorganic text. The first link is the main website, but I usually only focus on the 2nd and 3rd links which covering the experimental setup for an X-ra
A series of videos has been produced to show students the best way to assemble glass jointware. A variety of different examples are provided, with variations that demonstrate some of the more complicated assemblies that are often used in inorganic synthesis (e.g., how to protect the system with a drying tube or to purge an apparatus with an inert gas). The intent of the videos is to provide visual learners with a better idea of what they must do in the laboratory, and thereby speed up the process of assembling glass jointware.
Videos include:
We have developed an online tutorial that demonstrates the fundamental principles and applications of the various types of spectroscopy that students will encounter in the inorganic chemistry laboratory, namely infrared spectroscopy (IR), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis). The tutorial has been designed as a stand-alone interactive resource that can either introduce the fundamental aspects of spectroscopy from first principles or serve as a supplement for students who prefer to learn visually in an individual setti
This is how I always end my organometallics unit in my advanced inorganic chemistry class. The students have already learned electron counting, the major reaction types (oxidative addition (OA), reductive elimination (RE), 1,1- and 1,2-insertion, β-hydrogen elimination, and [2+2] cycloadditions), and have gone through naming elementary steps in class for some classic catalytic cycles (hydrogenation with Wilkinson's catalyst and the Monsanto acetic acid process).
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.