This website is a self-paced review of concepts for gen chem and includes test questions (and answers) for the reader. It would be a great site to point your intro chem students to if they want/need extra review. It is a set of 10 units, covering things like stoichiometry, unit conversions, and basic acid-base chemistry.
Theo Gray has compiled some of his Popular Science columns into a beautiful book of sometimes dangerous experiments, many of them with particular relevance to inorganic chemistry! With chapter names like "Experimental Cuisine", "Doomsday DIY", and "Twisted Shop Class", you know you in for a wild ride. Some particularly intriguing experiments include electroplating a copper design on your iPod, making glass and elemental silicon out of sand, making a burning Mg/dry ice sculpture, anodizing Ti for cool color effects, and creating a "hill billy hot tub" using 600 lbs of quicklime.
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).
While this site is also a commercial site (selling Theo's periodic tables and book, etc.) it is a wonderful resource of pictures of elements and their compounds, and "real life" uses of elements (such as a gamma ray imaging of the skeleton for Tc, a hard drive for B, and sushi for Hg!). It is also a source of movies of reactions of the elements, including some pretty impressive ones for the alkali metals and the thermite reaction. It also provides easy access to his chemistry column for Popular Science magazine.
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.