Online Educational Resources
The "open source" movement, which focuses on sharing and collaborating on free software, is finally coming to Education. It's easier now more than ever to easily access free materials online to augment your curriculum. Even the original business model of textbook companies is being challenged.
To find great videos, audio files, and still images to punch up multimedia projects and presentations go to the Find Multimedia Resources" section.
On this page we tried to choose the best sites where you can find copyright-free materials for your classroom,.
Online Courseware
Find lesson plans, unit ideas and other great educational resources from these consortiums and social networks.
- MIT Open Courseware -- Contains free syllabi, lectures, experiments, video and audio clips and assignments for hundreds of courses. Be sure to click on High School Highlights.
- OpenCourseware Consortium -- This consortium is attempting to aggregate all free courses from universities around the world.
- Curriki -- Online education site dedicated to offering free, open-source instructional materials for K-12.
- Connexions -- Another online community where you can view and share educational material. Designed to be used by both students and teachers.
- Academic Commons -- Great place to search for open educational resources.
- Folksemantic -- Great place to search for open educational resources.
- NYT: The Learning Network Blog: Lesson Plans -- Find some great lesson plans from the Learning Network Blog on the New York Times.
Open Textbooks
Consider "remixing" your textbook, choosing free, online resources compiled together for your students. These sites help you collocate resources to make your own textbook, or contribute to free, open-source textbooks created by similar subject-teachers.
- FlatWorld Knowledge -- This web-based digital textbook service allows you to create textbooks compiled of sources of your own choosing, specific to your class..
- CK12 Flexbook -- Another web-based digital textbook service designed for the K-12 school, with a focus on sharing created textbooks with the community.
- WikiJunior -- Another web-based digital textbook service designed for the K-12 school, with a focus on sharing created textbooks with the community.
- Wikibooks -- Another web-based digital textbook service designed for the K-12 school, with a focus on sharing created textbooks with the community.
Online Instructional Videos
More and more teachers are using online video in the classroom because it's an easy, quick way to illustrate concepts to visual-based learners. Consider embedding videos on Moodle for easy access and organization.
- Ted EDU -- Watch industry professionals give incredible lectures on a variety of topics. For a greater sense about how to use TED in the classroom, check out this Wiki: Teaching With TED
- Teacher's Domain -- Contains more than 3,000 FREE videos, Flash interactive, audio segments, images, and self-paced lessons and lesson plans for teachers from popular PBS shows such as NOVA, Frontline, Nature, Quest, and Cyberchase plus other public TV stations, universities, museums, and government agencies. Especially good for STEM programs.
- Khan Academy -- Contains short, comprehensible (less than 10-minute) YouTube lectures on a variety of complicated subjects such as stem cell research, etc.
- Watch Know -- This website organizes educational video from a variety of sources, organizing them by topics that can be drilled down.
- Academic Earth -- Videos of University-level lectures in a variety of disciplines. Ideal for professional development or for use in the classroom.
- Einztein -- An extensive collection of online University courses, covering a variety of subjects.
- Teacher Tube -- An online community for sharing instructional videos, filling a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners.
- Snag Learning -- A collection of great, free online documentaries, organized by topic, grade and producers.
- Next Vista for Learning -- A collection of great videos. Find a video to help you learn about a topic organized by subject areas.
In order to easily access videos in the classroom, you may want to download Youtube videos to your desktop. Videos are often downloaded as Flash videos, and it is easiest to use VLC Media Player to play these downloaded videos. Here are some resources you can use to download videos:
- Kick Youtube -- Add the word "kick" to a Youtube video URL to download the video.
- Keep Vid -- Copy URLs of videos to this website and download them to your desktop.
- Tube Chop -- Instead of downloading videos, use Tube Chop to only select the portion of a video you would like to play for your students.
Instructional Games
Consider using specially designed games to emphasize course concepts. More and more designers are creating free online games created specifically for instruction.
- National STEM Video Game Challenge -- Learn about and vote for your favorite educational games at this site.
- Games For Change - This group focuses on increasing real-world impact of digital games as an agent for social change. You can find a variety of games here that can be used for instructional purposes.
- Epistemic Games - In these real-world based games, players can see what it is like to live in the world of adults by simulating real-life careers, from journalism to engineering.
- The Best Collections of Online Educational Games - In this blog post, Larry Ferlazzo links to many interesting games available for teachers to use in the classroom.
Infographics and Data Visualization
Infographics are modern equivalents of charts, graphs, and maps in which information is visually represented. It is important for 21st Century students to interact with visual information. Below are some sources for and samples of infographics.
Social Networks
More and more teachers are actively collaborating on less plans, projects, and curriculums. Consider joining an online social network to develop a Professional Learning Network (PLN).
- Classroom 2.0 -- This social network is a great place to "mine the crowd" of teachers for best-practices and resources with a focus on using social media in the classroom.
- Shmoop -- An online community created by educators for educators with great classroom resources.
- Educational Origami -- Contains a blog and wiki about 21st century learning that advocates changing the where, when, why, and how of what we teach.
- Edufy -- Find, create, and share learning activities with other educators at this social network.
|
Divisional Resources
For more division-specific resources and project ideas, check out our division pages located in the "What's Hot in Education" section:
|
