There are many free tools to engage and inspire students in a variety of subjects. These interactive tools can be used to encourage self-directed learning or to create fun, dynamic group projects. Here are a few resources that may be helpful in your classroom:
Each month, over two million people from around the world visit abcteach for PreK - 8 materials and creative activities for students and educators. They have over 5,000 free documents available, including printable worksheets, interactive activities, theme units, and much more.
Academic Earth was founded with the goal of extending high-quality online learning opportunities to people around the globe. They are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Their goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
Adobe Reader software is the global standard for electronic document sharing. It is the only PDF file viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents. Use Adobe Reader to view, search, digitally sign, verify, print, and collaborate on Adobe PDF files.
Asymptopia Crossword Builder is a JavaScript education application that runs in any modern internet browser but does not require an internet connection. The simple controls allow teachers or parents to create unlimited math crosswords, or supply their own word. Some suggested uses include: cities, countries, latitudes and longitudes to teach geography and spherical trig, simultaneously; Periodic table word; foreign language learning exercise; and terminology practice with virtually any other subject.
Have students gather images from the Web or snap their own photos on a subject. Then, they can create a unique piece of art using this free collage-making tool.
The visual aspect of Bing makes searching the Internet a more captivating and rewarding experience for students. Bing Maps offer breathtaking, bird's eye views of the world that can enhance any project.
This helpful tool easily converts what you have written into nearly any language you need. Cut and paste the text into the area indicated, and click Translate.
BookBoon is focused on publishing education related books for business professionals and students. In 2005 the company made a strategic leap and became the first book publishing company in the world to focus 100% on free eBooks. Ever since, the company has been aiming to set new standards in the world of modern publishing based on the readers’ needs.
CLRN is a free digital textbook initiative that provides educators with a "one-stop" resource for critical information needed for the selection of supplemental electronic learning resources aligned to the State Board of Education academic content standards.
The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.
Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux. Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabeth, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc. Childsplay is part of the schoolsplay.org project.
CK-12 Flexbooks offer customizable, free, curriculum-aligned content for K-12! CK-12 Foundation, launched in 2006, is a not for profit organization with the goal of decreasing textbook materials costs for the K-12 education market in the United States and around the world. CK-12 hopes to be a pioneer in generating and distributing high quality educational content through the use of a web-based open content material, termed the "FlexBook.” The Flexbook is a digital textbook that allows individuals to adapt the content as they see fit. This allows educators to customize their texts to their students’ learning styles, locations, languages, or ability levels. Updating text is also just a click away. Not only is it adaptable, but it is also affordable. CK-12 allows individuals to create, edit, and print textbooks for free. No longer do districts have to rely on book companies whose products are often expensive and out of date. CK-12 flexbooks conform to national and state curriculum guidelines and standards, are available to everyone, and is currently the only free service like this of its kind.
View and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute.
This partial list of sources introduces the scope of OER and the organizations cultivating its increasingly vital role in opening higher education up to the greatest number of people worldwide.
Dance Mat Typing offers an introduction to touch typing for children aged 7 - 11 years, and includes great instructional and visual graphics for hand placement.
The Digital Literacy Curriculum offers classroom-ready digital-rights curriculum. It is great for anyone with basic reading skills who wants to learn the fundamentals of computer technology. The curriculum is written at a reading level similar to that of most newspapers around the world. Learners who complete the curriculum will understand basic computing concepts and skills.
Edmodo provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. Their goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner.
Education World is a resource where teachers can gather and share ideas, including lesson plans, practical information for educators, and information on how to integrate technology in the classroom. There are also articles written by education experts, web site reviews, special features and columns, and employment listings.
Check out this site where you can play with online flashcards. It keeps track of what you know and uses that information to determine which card to show you next. It's memory optimization based on science combined with a fun, flashy look and feel.
Flat World is an educational initiative that empowers students and let them decide how they want to learn. All books in the program are placed online for free, and print-on-demand softcovers (for a low fee), and audio books are available as well. These books are also open for instructors to modify and make their own. The flexibility offered here is the key selling point, and students are even allowed to purchase single chapters rather than the whole book (or read the whole thing online for free).
Remixable textbooks by expert authors, free online and affordable offline.
Foxit is a leading provider of solutions for reading, editing, creating, organizing, and securing PDF documents and forms. Customers choose Foxit products since they are fast, affordable, secure, and easy to deploy.
Foxit Reader is a small, fast, and feature rich PDF viewer which allows you to open, view, and print any PDF file. Unlike other free PDF readers, Foxit Reader also includes easy to use collaboration features like the ability to add annotations to PDF, fill out PDF forms, and share information with social networks.
Free Tech Books is a resource which lists out computer science and programming books which are made freely & legally available on the Internet. No pirated links, or books here,just a regularly updated list of downloadable books about topics ranging from operating systems to computing mathematics.
FreeTypingGame.Net offers a complete interactive typing tutor to learn to type. It teaches 2 keys at a time, followed up with a review of all the keys in the previous lessons. The typing tutor lesson methodology is simple. Using a color coded keyboard, with corresponding color coded hands, they guide the typist through the keyboard, 2 keys at a time, starting with the home row keys and working the way out.
The content available on their Shared Resources Website is available for anyone to view. Courses are divided into modules and are aligned with the Georgia Performance Standards.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) provides image manipulation software for GNU/Linux and UNIX. It is a raster editor, which means that it performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and not a vector editor. Other (proprietary) raster editors include Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paintshop Pro and the humble Microsoft Paint. Users wanting to edit photographs will prefer a raster editor like GIMP.
Google Apps for Education is a broad IT solution that schools can use to bring communication and collaboration tools to the entire academic community for free. Google manages all the technology details, so you can focus your time, energy and budgets on teaching your kids.
Immue Attack is a high tech 3D computer game that teaches how the human body and the immune system work. In this game, you program a nanobot to teach all cells in the body how to fight bacterial and viral infections. A great game for high school science students.
The Intel AppUp Centers provides a centralized catalog of thousands of netbook apps in one convenient location. Applications are available for education, social, entertainment, communications, etc. Their "Study Up" category provides apps for back-to-school, helping students study and work more efficiently.
Intel offers free, easily integrated tools and teaching resources to support collaborative student-centered learning. Our online thinking tools provide active learning places where students can engage in robust discussions, analyze complex information, pursue investigations, and solve problems. You’ll also find teaching resources such as exemplary lesson plans, assessment strategies, and technology-enriched project ideas for all K–12 subjects. Developed by educators, these free tools and resources support 21st century learning, with project-based approaches in the classroom.
iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways, including seeing what's going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots, remote control computers to support and help other people, show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) - the teacher's screen is shown on all student's computers in realtime, lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher, and much more.
Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun! IXL allows teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students and motivate them through interactive games and practice questions. Widely recognized as the Web's most comprehensive math site, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment for children to practice math. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.
K-12 Blueprint offers resources for education leaders involved in planning and implementing technology initiatives. Whether you are launching a one-to-one or BYO program, moving from print textbooks to digital content, revamping the curriculum to improve STEM learning, rethinking assessment, or embarking on (or continuing to support) any other ambitious technology-supported initiative, Intel’s Blueprint model can help.
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. The website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,400 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics and computer science.
Educational games are a great tool for building foundation math and language skills that today's elementary school curriculum requires. These online learning games and songs for kids are fun, teach important skills for preschool and elementary school kids and they're free. LearningGamesforKids.com includes educational games that help build skills in math, language, science, social studies, and more.
LilyPond is an automated engraving system. It formats music beautifully and automatically, and has a friendly syntax for its input files. It is Free Software (open source).
Little Wizard is a development environment for children. It is intended to be used by primary school children to learn about the main elements of real computer languages. Using only the mouse, children can explore programming concepts such as variables, expressions, loops, conditions, and logical blocks. Every element of the language is represented by an intuitive icon, making it easy to learn. Little Wizard works under Linux and Windows 2000/XP.
Easily create your own math worksheets with practice problems to give your students. This tool generates multiple math problems based on a sample and then creates a worksheet that you can distribute.
If you or your child need to remember information for an upcoming test or exam, the free Memory Lifter automated flash card system may be the answer. Memory Lifter is a free flash card program that presents flash cards using various sensory outputs and using a special display technique that enhances a student's ability to remember.
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching; the place to find online learning materials, web sites and educational digital libraries.
This free downloadable tool helps students visualize and see mathematical concepts as never before, including step-by-step instructions and easy to understand explanations of fundamental concepts.
Microsoft offers free training courses and tutorials, as well as training roadmaps that show which courses are available and offers information on the training.
Students can explore famous places in the world with cinematic quality using this virtual, visual three-dimensional tour.
MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.
Shares Moodle courses and other content useful for Moodle teachers.
MoodleShare is a community of Moodlers sharing their Moodles, Moodle Sites, and Moodle Lessons.
Integrate multiple choice, polling and true/false questions into your lessons with this free add-in for PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2010 that lets students use mice to answer.
A growing library of high-quality online course content for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement.
OCW Search is an independent search engine that indexes the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative content so you can find these courses faster.
As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
Office add-ins allows you to add academic-specific features and functions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, such as making presentations interactive, graph equations, and more.
The Ohio Treasure Chest is an online collection of thousands of websites which are high-quality, teacher-reviewed, interactive, and free. Each website is aligned directly to the Ohio Academic Content Standards in math, science, language arts, and social studies, and ready for use in your classroom.
Open Course Library is a repository of course modules that anyone can download, customize and use for free. The first phase involves the publishing and open licensing of 42 introductory courses (of an expected 81), none of which compels students to purchase more than $30 of additional course content.
Unique to OHSU is our commitment to share the curriculum we have developed as an open educational resource.
OpenLearn gives you free access to learning materials from The Open University.
Offer these courses to your students. You can customize them to suit their needs.
Open Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.
Open Source Physics Project offers curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling.
Open Textbooks allows you to view over 500 open textbooks in many subject areas.
A collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.
Bring a subject to life with music and pictures. This free, downloadable program has tools to enhance, crop, and rotate your digital photos. Students and teachers can easily create a slide show with just a few clicks.
Photosynth is a powerful set of tools for capturing and viewing the world in 3D.
RekenTest is an arithmetic quiz program that tests your skills in operations such as addition and subtraction, the multiplication tables, decimals, money problems, percentages and fractions.
A very nice, and free, geography teaching package. Covers all parts of the world. Includes quizzes and map exercises. Runs in several different languages. Each exercise has a high score list.
Small Basic is a simplified version of Microsoft's programming language Visual Basic, suitable for kids and beginners. It includes dozens of lessons and exercises that explain basic programming concepts in detail.
Bring out the musical creativity in your students. Choose a style-from pop to jazz or R&B. Have a student sing into a PC microphone, and Songsmith will generate musical accompaniment to match his or her voice.
Soup Toys takes the concept of physics and transforms it into a software tool that lets children (or children at heart) play around with objects that actually interact with the world around it in a manner that obeys all of the laws of physics.
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
Stick animations are a fun and simple way to create your own stories in pictures. Add people, animals, letters and objects and move and bend them a little in each frame, and with very little effort you have built an entire movie!
Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Through Sugar's clarity of design, children and their teachers have the opportunity to use computation on their own terms; they are free to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful learning activities. Sugar is a community project; it is based on GNU/Linux, a free and open-source operating system.
Sumo Paint is a full featured photo editing / painting application, which works right in your favorite web browser! The application can be used in Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems. sumopaint.com is a thriving online art community of over a 15 million unique users and over 300 000 registered members from over 220 countries. The primary purpose of the community is to create, share, remix, explore, comment, rate and fave the artwork of its members. Sumopaint.com hosts the internet's most versatile painting / photo manipulation application called the Sumo Paint.
Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors.
Tipp10 is a simple but effective free typing tutor. It logs and analyzes a whole list of very detailed information that can help you understand where you're making most of your mistakes and how you can improve.
Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.
"Tux, of Math Command" ("TuxMath," for short) is an educational arcade game starring Tux, the Linux mascot! Based on the classic arcade game "Missile Command," Tux must defend his cities. In this case, though, he must do it by solving math problems.
Vision Learning is an award-winning collection of peer-reviewed learning modules written by professional educators and scientists.
We Teach We Learn is a Student Created Content Course Book A Neat fill in the blank book great for elementary, Sp Ed and/or ELL.
Find out how to get up and running with Windows 7, and browse the most-viewed trouble shooting articles.
The Windows Academic Program provides universities with curriculum materials, Windows kernel source code, and a project environment for teaching operating system principles using Windows.
Make your classroom lessons even more memorable with a movie. Windows Live Movie Maker is the fast, easy way to turn photos and video clips into great-looking movies and slide shows you can share in class or on the Web.
Gain access to 25 gigabytes (GB) of free, online storage. Use it for a student or teacher workgroup to upload and share documents in one central place, rather than trying to track them in e-mails. Store your photos and files, and access them with a password.
Wisc-Online is a digital library of Web-based learning objects.
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a free tool brings together imagery from the world's best ground and space-based telescopes. It not only offers guided tours from interesting places in the sky, but also enables students to explore the night sky by panning and zooming to distant planets and galaxies.
Zoodles.com is a simple, safe, and free web browser for young children, created by a team of educational professionals with your child's Internet safety in mind. Kids love the Zoodles browser because it offers them a virtual toybox full of educational, entertaining sites that are age- and interest-specific.