OERs

Open Education Resources: Free Learning on the Web

Udacity Free, interactive college courses. I just started Intro to Computer Science tonight, and it is awesome! Thumbs up! Way up!

The 18 Best Free Web Tools Chosen by Educators List includes Claco, ClassDojo, Diigo, Dropbox, Edmodo, Evernote, GlogsterEDU, Google Apps for Education, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, KidBlog, Pinterest, LiveBinders, Socrative, ThingLink, Storify, Twitter, and Wordle. (Explanation of each tool and link provided.)

TED-Ed This is the most exciting educational video site I have ever come across. Fantastic videos, quizzes that embed both multiple choice and "dig deeper" questions as well as linked resources for further learning. Many different kinds of high-interest topics across more than just the usual math, science and language arts areas. This site is a MUST SEE!!

WatchKnowLearn.org Great site for thousands of instructional video delineated by specific skill across many, many K-12 content areas.

60 of the Best Websites and Apps for Teachers Great slide deck here listing many great free tools to more fully engaging students in their learning.

Birth of a Tornado Nice graphics in an easy-to-understand format.

15 Free Online Portfolio Hosting Sites Great tool to use to provide alternative assessments or extra credit work to online students.

Explore the Human Microbiome (Interactive) Learn about the bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms that maintain human health.

Peer to Peer University (P2PU) Free, online, open-licensed professional development courses for K-12 teachers

Create great infographics at these sites: Easel.ly (Create and share visual ideas online) [|Visual.ly] (Publish and share your infographics) Venngage (Create and publish infographics and track your results) Infogram (Create interactive infographics) Piktochart (Drap and drop infographic creator)

30+ Open WIkis Every Educator Should Know About List complied by Edudemic

Math Playground Math games for grades K-8 and Algebra.

Soft Schools Worksheets, games, and quizzes for many grade levels and content areas.

TED-Ed Lessons Worth Sharing. Teachers team up with TED animators and media specialists to create fabulous 10-minute lessons on a wide range of subjects. A must see!

Tennessee Electronic Library The Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL) is a collection of 40+ databases that provide access to over 400,000 magazine, journal, and newspaper articles, essays, podcasts, videos, e-books, primary source materials, and more! TEL is available free of charge to any Tennessee resident and is accessible 24/7 from any computer with access to the internet. Connexions
 * 20134** reusable modules woven into **1201** collections across many content areas.

40 Ideas for Formative Assessment (via Lindsey McCarter)

Open Learning Initiative OLI is an open educational resources project that began in 2002. We use knowledge from learning science and the affordances of the web to transform instruction, significantly improve learning outcomes and to achieve significant increases in productivity in post secondary education. Our Goals
 * **Produce exemplars of scientifically based online courses** and course materials that enact instruction and support instructors. Our courses are designed based on learning science research and contribute to that research.
 * **Provide open access to our courses and materials.** Like many open educational resources projects, ours makes its courses openly and freely available. However, our courses are not collections of material created by individual faculty to support traditional instruction. While our courses are often used by instructors to support classroom instruction, OLI online courses are designed to support an individual learner, who does not have the benefit of an instructor.
 * **Develop a community of use, research, and development** that contributes to the evaluation, continuous improvement, and ongoing growth of the courses and materials.
 * Courses available in Statistics, Chemistry, Biology, French and more.**

Word Dynamo by Dictionary.com A new website that combines online gaming with tried-and-true study methods and the great reference content you love from Dictionary.com. The best part? It's free, and is already used by over 1.3 million students, teachers, and parents.

Bookshare Thousands of e-books for students with print disabilities.

Pete's PowerPoint Station A huge collection of interactive PowerPoints across all content areas K-12.

Quizlet Make online flashcards for any subject that can be shared in your favorite social networks. Many card decks available across all subjects free and read to go!

LindseyMcCarter.com An amazing collection of websites from the oh-so-creative brain of HCVS educator extraordinaire Lindsey McCarter. You go, girl!

Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement An excerpt from the SoundOut program promoting student voice in schools as a means of gleaning greater engagement.

TextbooksFree.org Hundreds of free e-texts as well as links to complete courses.

BetterLesson.org Find lesson plans, classroom materials and instructional resources from high-performing teachers. Browse a wide array of documents, presentations, full lessons--even complete units and courses. Share your curriculum and connect with fellow educators around the world.

Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Suggested resources from the American Association of School Librarians.

A nice comprehensive list of free tools for teaching and learning.

Free resource from MakeUseOf.com

Thank-you, Kerry Eades, for this awesome resource.

Student Edge StudentEdge is a free online college and career planning resource center. It offers tools to help all high school students take ownership of the college planning process by letting them find scholarship money, prepare for exams, search for colleges, and explore career interests.

Teacher's Domain Digital media for the classroom and professional development. Don't pass up this link! Go right now and see what is available in this one site alone. Awesome!!!!

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) Teaching and learning resources from federal agencies. Includes, animations, primary docs, photos and videos.

Mashable's Explore Education Content can be found here. This is a resource for finding top stories about topics that interest you.

Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning This terrific site from the American Association of School Librarians even lists standards that can be addressed by each tool they recommend -- all free!

neoK12 A comprehensive collection of educational videos, lessons and games for grades K-12.

33 Indispensable Open Courseware Tools: Search, Browse, and Bookmark You don’t have to have a master’s degree — or any degree — to continue learning. And you don’t have to be enrolled in college in order to take college level courses, It’s even possible to take graduate level courses from prestigious universities. And you can do it for free.

Google Apps Marketplace for Education (Many are free!)

Free Technology for Teachers Lots of resources here.

Best Educational Wikis of 2010 Examples of how wikis can be used to break down borders and build unique and captivating experiences that learners and educators will remember for years to come.

30 of the Best Educational Tools for Auditory, Visual & Kinesthetic Learners A nice one-stop shop for many free apps that are listed elsewhere. Go play!

RCampus ePortfolio The most comprehensive and flexible electronic portfolio management environment for easily creating lifelong ePortfolios to serve a variety of purposes.
 * Complete: The most comprehensive solution
 * Lifelong: Build & keep multiple ePortfolios
 * Affordable: Free edition with premium upgrades

Aviary Design Suite for Education Free design tools and templates to create, modify and share images, presentations, audio tracks, podcasts & more. Classrooms can collaborate on multimedia projects. Works directly in Google Docs.


 * Create Logos, Presentation Slides, Yearbook Pages
 * Retouch photos, Make Web Templates & Icons
 * Develop Podcasts, Remix Audio & More

TED Talks: Ideas Worth Spreading Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. Features thought leaders from education and technology sectors. (TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design)

Ten TED Talks That Teachers Should Watch

Academic Earth An amazing site containing lectures that cover an entire course from Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA professors and others in a wide variety of subjects. A veritable banquet for lifelong, lifewide learners. A fantastic find!

Free Video Lectures 790+ Online courses, 18,400+ Videos from Top 30+ Universities on 35+ Categories. Download in MP4, FLV, MP3 and Torrents

App Inventor A free Google Labs application students can use to build simple apps using a drag and drop format for an Android and compatible phone. Students can share their app and collaborate with other users via the forum.

FlexBooks Customizable, standards-aligned, free digital textbooks for K-12 classes.

A Mindmap of Mindmapping Applications This is an amazing graphic that clearly shows all the mindmapping tools available on the web, as software, free, etc. More resources from Russell Tarr can be found at ClassTools.Net

7 Things You Should Know About . . . This series of artices from Educause provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Covers a wide variety of topics and technologies.

The 101 Most Useful Websites These websites reportedly solve one problem really well. )

Vimeo Video School 101 Great, brief tutorials on shooting and editing great videos using both iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.

A great list of additional Web 2.0 resources can be found here.

EduHound - An extensive, free educational technology resource. Has free clip art, templates and collections of topic-based online resources.

KHAN Academy - 1800+ videos on core subjects. All free.

Worksheet Library -- 16,000+ K-8 worksheets across all content areas (893 of them are free)

Find Out How -- Apple videos to help PC users feel comfortable on a Mac.

Free communication, collaboration tools and software from Microsoft

Digital Storytelling A free eBook with complete instructions for using technology to tell stories.

Teaching Resources LiveBinder Using a new way to organize web content--LiveBinders--this teacher has linked a great number of web tools organized by task.

101 Web Apps For Your Start-Up Toolbox - Nice collection of free tools for educators and businesses.

Ocean Pollution - Interactive web resource on ocean pollution from NROC. Very nice!

Apples4TheTeacher - Educational games and other resources for PreK - Grade 6.

Virtual Learning Network The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) supports the concept of classrooms without walls, where students and educators have the flexibility to connect with their classes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Where a rich and diverse range of courses, programmes and activities, from early childhood through to tertiary, are offered by New Zealand-based educators.

25 Places to Find Instructional Videos - Find instrctional videos on all topics --free!

"The Future of Learning is Increasingly Free" An interesting article by Donald Clark, an award-winning designer of e-learning tools and author of numerous articles on the topic.

Jane Hart's 2009 Top 100 Resources for Teaching and Learning on the Web -- A fantastic list of cool tools!

Learning Tools Directory 2010 Web tools organized by 12 categories: Instructional Tools; Live Tools; Document & Presentation Tools; Blogging, Web & Wiki Tools; Image, Audio & Video Tools; Communication Tools; Micro-blogging Tools; More Collaboration Tools; Social Networking and Collaboration Spaces; Personal Productivity Tools; Browsers, Players & Readers; Mobile Tools. This annual report describes the work of the New Media Consortium in its efforts to identify and detail emerging technologies that are likely to have a great impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression in the next one to five years. Fascinating report!

A list of great resources in Social Media and Web 2.0 created by the SREB/AT&T Online Teachers Initiative

[|iNACOL Resources] Follow this link to access reports, publications, standards, research and more available through this International Association for K-12 Online Learning. This article gives specific examples of how some educators are using wikis to involve their students in creating curriculum and collaborating with their peers around academic topics. This article defines OERs and points to their significance in the advancement of lifelong learning. What is an OER: sharing knowledge, equalizing educational oppotunities, often contain complete couress This article delineates how open education resources in combination with social networking tools such as wikis, blogs, Facebook and MySpace allows for a great variety of peer-to-peer learning, often without adding any expense to a school budget.

A comprehensive report of American virtual schools and online programs.

SREB 2010 Report on State Virtual Schools in SREB States (Executive Summary)

[|Open Education Resources Commons] (Free to use education resources from around the globe.)

[|GradeGuru] (The Web 2.0 version of a study group. Students collaborate and share notes from their classes.) [|Mr.Nussbaum.Com] (Great site for elementary games and simulations about many subjects.) [|Wikis In Plain English] [|Factmonster] [|Internet4Classrooms] (Thousands of free interactive activities for K-12, test preparation, teacher and student resources) [|4teachers.org] (Create rubrics, online quizzes and more) [|Bloom's Taxonomy] [|Learnthat.com] (Tutorials about how to use software applications) [|Hippocampus.org] (Free high school and college courses from the National Repository of Online Courses) [|Aolatschool.com] (Tutorials, learning games, student and educator resources) [|Purplemath.com] (Algebra I & II content, games, etc.) [|Coolmath.com] (Algebra I & II content) [|Education.ti.com] (Downloads for graphic calculators and other student resources) [|Sosmath.com] (Includes calculus, high level math) [|Jeffersoninst.org] (Jefferson Institute) [|iTunes U] (Many courses from a variety of colleges and universities. Accessible through iTunes Store but access to all courseware, lectures, and the like is free.) [|Wikibooks.org] (Open-content textbooks) [|About.com] [|Starfall.com] (Site for young, emergent readers, ABCs, etc.) [|Exploratorium.edu] (Science for all grades, hands-on teacher resources) [|Studyspanish.com] (Free and paid levels of access) [|Lawrence University Sites in Spanish] (Many resources here for Spanish teachers – is a portal to many, many sites) [|Open-video.org] (Several thousand videos online here, including many from NASA) [|PBS Teacherline] (Professional Development for PreK-12 teachers. Tons of good stuff from PBS) PBS Site for Teachers (Access to educational services and searchable database of more than 9,000 free national standards-based teaching activities, lesson plans, on-demand video assets, interactive games, and simulations [|TVOKids.com] (Kids connect the dots and play other games as they answer content questions) [|Dancemattyping.org] (Keyboarding games) [|Founding.com] (Text of original historical documents with hyperlinked explanations, etc.) [|Merlot.org] (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) [|Dancedrummer.com] (Encyclopedia of rhythms) [|General Chemistry Online]

[|Physics Education Technology] (University of Colorado at Boulder's Interactive Physics Simulations site) [|CoolScience] (From Howard Hughes Medical Institute - many cool things here for students and teachers on a wide variety of science topics)

[|Kent ICT] (Support for teachers and students in use of technology in education)

[|Teachernet] (Help for teachers to integrate technology into the classroom)

[|ActualMe.com] (Personality tests. Help in identifying personal communication styles)

[|Space Explorers] ( Space Explorers’ virtual missions, experiments, and data analysis tools were founded upon the idea that students involved in the excitement of NASA missions could be highly motivated to pursue careers in math, science, and technology fields.) [|Math Open Reference] (Complete online Geometry curriculum. Many highly interactive tools and animations.) [|Free Rice] (Quiz games with a purpose. For each correct answer, UN World Food Program donates 10 grains of rice to help end hunger.)

**New Finds!** Learn.Genetics (An amazing site from the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center. Excellent resource for science and health teachers.)

Foreign Language Teachers: To link to Marlene's very cool wiki for foreign language teachers, click [|here].

[|100 Language Learning Websites] (An alphabetical list of websites where you can learn a language. Some sites provide content, others community, and a number have both.)

[|Voki.com] (Create your own talking avator to embed in your email, blog or profile) [|Feedjit] (Creates a map of the visitors to your site)

[|Curriki] (Global Education and Learning Community)

[|Thinkfinity] (Free online educational resources for everyone - educators, students, parents and afterschool programs. Endorsed by the Tennessee Department of Education as an excellent resource for teachers.)

Cool Tools for Schools (An amazing collection of tools to create video, audio, slideshows, collaborate and many other things. Definitely check this one out!)

SmartTeaching.org Resources: [|100 Awesome Classroom Videos to Learn New Teaching Techniques]

[|50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom]

[|100 Motivational Techniques to Take Learning to the Next Level]

[|Skoolaborate] (Students and teachers from several countries have come together to create curricular content in Second Life using a blend of many technologies.)

[|Exit Realty] (3-D Web browser launched by Australian company. Turns any webpage into a three-dimensional experience.)

[|HCVS Website]

[|Do schools kill creativity?] A talk from Sir Ken Robinson, author of //Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative// and //The Element.//

[|How to create an interactive whiteboard from a Wii remote] (An amazing video of research by Johnny Lee.)

[|101 Undiscovered Freebies: The List] (101 innovative, entirely free downloads and services collected by PC World's Preston Gralla and Adam Pash) [|Go2Web20] (An extensive index of Web 2.0 applications tagged for a very wide array of interests and uses.)

[|21Classes Cooperative Learning] (Use this free site to create social network and blog site for students.)