Communicating with Chemical Structures
We are forced to interact at a distance for at least part of this term. While I can use a lot of tools to convey aspects of chemical structure, you will need to learn how to use some of those to allow us effective 2-way communication. When you post to a discussion board, or even if you email me, you'll need to convey accurate information about chemical structure. On the bright side, I think doing so will help you solidify your understanding of structure and maybe also of the chemistry.
I can offer three possible ways of communicating structure.
1. OSU has a site license to ChemDraw. This is the industry standard for 2-D chemical structure drawing. It is available free, but you do have to register using your oregonstate.edu email. Go to https://softwarelist.oregonstate.edu/software/chemdraw to begin the process. ChemDraw is a palette-driven drawing program; you can select a variety of structural elements to create a structure, a reaction or a mechanism. While you can certainly post the native file, it's probably better to "Save As" a png file and post that as a graphic. (This is how I make graphics for the exams and other handouts.) It's available for Windows or for Mac; I run the Windows version on Linux under Wine.
I think it would be great if everyone in the course started to use ChemDraw. It has a bunch of neat bells & whistles (structure <-> name translation, H and C NMR prediction), templates for complex structures, as well as a very thorough set of tools for regular structure drawing.
2. JChemPaint is a Java application (not a browser applet) that is open source freeware. It does a big chunk of what ChemDraw does; the one drawback is that you do need a working version of Java installed to run this on your computer. I'm pretty sure it won't run on tablets but I haven't tried. It will run on anything that has Java installed. You can export as a number of graphics formats; PNG is my preference.
3. JSME is a component of the JSmol software I'm using on the Web site. I have a couple of useful pages:
Draw a single molecule
Draw a reaction
This is not as full-featured as the other two, but it does not require installing anything on your computer. The biggest drawback is that there is no direct export to a graphics file. You can certainly take a screen shot (very easy in Firefox; harder to do in other browsers), but an alternative would be to capture what's called a SMILES output--a computer code for the structure. Click the yellow smiley face, and then copy & paste the string in the popup window. Other programs including ChemDraw can interpret and plot SMILES strings as 2-D structures.
A neat element is that you can translate your structure to a 3-D model in the box on the right by clicking the right arrow between the boxes.
I know there are a few tablet- and phone-based apps, but they are to my knowledge very limited in both what they allow you to draw, and in the kind of output they allow. If you find one you like, you might mention it on the Discussion Board.