If you are interested in giving your students some lightweight introduction to R, here is a nice tutorial that teaches basic R syntax.
Could be useful for these students that want to learn how to use R for statistical analysis
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-r.
A much more detailed R manual can be found here.
Gabry
If you want to take R alittle further, read this review
A general pipeline for quality and statistical assessment of protein interaction data using R and Bioconductor. Chiang T , Scholtens D ID:19325550