15 Open Source Resources for Educators

Finding open source or free resources is a great way to enhance learning and increase productivity in the classroom. There are many different applications, tools, and other materials available online.

This list provides 15 free open source resources that are perfect for educators:

Bookgoo – Bookgoo is a free web app that provides tools to highlight and annotate documents. The app works well for grading papers and sharing notes online.

Eduslide – Eduslide provides free open source tools to create online classrooms courses, chat rooms, and forums.

FlashcardExchange – FlashcardExchange is a free flashcard maker used by teachers around the world. Flashcards created on this site can be printed out or shared online.

Mikogo – Mikogo is a desktop sharing tool that is free for both private and commercial use. This innovative site works well for webinars, online conferences, and remote support.

Artopia – Artopia is a comprehensive art site designed for middle school children. This creative site gives students the opportunity to examine art and learn art techniques from others.

GroupTweet – This Twitter app allows teachers to communicate with their students privately. Teachers simply sign up for an account and then register their students as members to converse with them privately.

Empressr – Empressr is a free multimedia tool for creating presentations. This visual storytelling tool allows you to add images, videos, audio, and text.

NoteMesh – This open source app allows students in the same class to share and collaborate on notes.

Thinkfinity – The Verizon Foundation’s Thinkfinity offers lesson plans, interactive games, and activities that are perfect for the classroom.

FREE – FREE (Federal Resources for Educational Excellence) provides many free resources for teachers including lesson plans, animations, primary docs, video, and photos.

Smithsonian Education – Smithsonian Education offers several open source materials for teachers including lesson plans, games, and more. The materials cover a wide variety of subjects and grades.

Remember the Milk – Remember the Milk is an online task manager that provides tools to manage tasks quickly, send notifications, and make lists from anywhere.

Microsoft Education – This educational website from Microsoft offers lesson plans, training, and an educator’s community.

4Teachers.org – 4Teachers.org is an open source site that offers several tools and resources to integrate technology into the classroom. Just a few features of this site include web lessons, quizzes, rubrics, and calendars.

Web-Chops – This free site provides tools to collect and share web content. The content you collect can then be organized and displayed on one page.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online classes for OnlineClasses.org.

20 Free eduTech Resources

  From web apps and course management tools to social learning sites and online classes, there are many edutech resources available online. These resources are a great way for students and lifelong learners to discover, create, and share educational information.

10 eduTech Resources

Shmoop – Shmoop offers fun and refreshing study guides for literature, U.S. history, and poetry. The site is specifically designed to make students better lovers of literature, better writers, and more critical thinkers.

 VerbaLearn – VerbaLearn helps students study vocabulary more effectively with MP3 files, video flashcards, puzzles, and review resources.

 iTalki – iTalki is an online language learning site that uses social networking, and crowdsourcing to increase understanding of foreign languages and cultures. This site offers many innovative features, including socially-driven questions, knowledge wikis, multimedia chat capability, and file sharing.

 OCW – The OCW features a master list of colleges and universities with open courseware programs. The site lists schools in the U.S. and abroad.

 SecondLife – This virtual world houses hundreds of universities and schools around the globe. SecondLife can be used to connect with other people or study online.

 Scitable – Scitable is a free collaborative learning and teaching portal with scientific insights, study resources, and teaching aids. This site concentrates on the fields of genetics, evolution, and variation.

 Grammar Girl – This friendly grammar site/podcast from Mignon Fogarty provides easy to remember grammar tips and rules. Listening to this podcast is a great way for anyone to improve their grammar and writing.

 Wolfram Demonstration Project – The Wolfram Demonstration Project features demonstrations to illustrate concepts in art, science, math, technology, finance, and other fields. This site can be used to illustrate difficult concepts, explain new mathematical ideas, and help with thesis research.

 Livemocha – With over 2 million members, Livemocha provides an excellent platform for language learning. The site offers free lessons and helps connect people with language partners all over the world.

 Arkive – Arkive is a large collection of images, videos, and fact files of the world’s species. This is the perfect site for exploring and learning about geography and the species of the world.

10 eduTech Tools

 WizIQ – WizIQ is a free web app for anyone who wants to learn or teach online. It can be used to create virtual classes, online tests, educational content, and web seminars.

 JingProject – JingProject makes it easy to share your computer screen with others online. It works well for collaborating on a project, editing a document, and commenting on homework.

ProProfs – ProProfs offers free tools for creating and sharing knowledge. This site features tools for creating quizzes, polls, flashcards, brain games, wiki’s, and forums.

 VoiceThread – This interactive site provides a tool for sharing information through images, documents, and videos. VoiceThread gives you the opportunity to showcase information that others can comment on in five different ways.

 Yugma – Yugma is a free tool that can be used for web conferences, online meetings, desktop sharing, and collaboration.

 Class Wiki – This free web app provides a platform for teaching and classroom activities. This Wiki service allows you to drag content, such as video, graphics, and text, into a space for educational instruction.

 Edmodo – Edmodo is a microblogging site created for teachers and students. This free edutech tool makes it easy for teachers to safely and securely send events, alerts, assignments, and more.

 Moodle – Moodle provides a free platform for creating online learning sites. This global project is open to everyone and can be modified for your needs.

 Connexions – With over 14,000 modules of scholarly information, Connexions provides invaluable resources that can be organized into books, courses, and reports. This site provides information on many different subjects, including art, business, humanities, math, science, and social sciences.

 Cramberry – This online flashcard site offers free pre-made flashcards for thousands of topics. It can also be used to create and study your own flashcards. Cramberry is a more intelligent way to study because it records progress, shows trouble cards more often, and makes studying more effective.

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Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online colleges for OnlineCollege.org.

Where the Educational Technology Graduate Program Leads

We live in a world where information is power, and change is inevitable. The swift changes taking place in the world of education reflect the advances being made in the field of technology.

Technology has also made rapid inroads into education, not just in helping students learn, but also as a tool in aiding instructors to teach. The Master’s program in Education Technology is designed to help you master the concepts and principles of the subject and provide you with the knowledge and skills to shine in a variety of positions.

Some careers options for graduates of this program are:

• Education Specialist: As an education specialist, you direct and evaluate research related to educational programs, set up procedures and protocols to measure progress (of students, groups and the educational institution itself) and ensure learning objectives are met, conduct studies, evaluate data and prepare reports for future improvements, plan and implement budgets and other special educational programs.
• School Technology Coordinator: As a technology coordinator for an educational institution, particularly K-12, you assist the technological needs of the staff, administration, and students by creating multimedia components and implementing software/hardware to supplement instruction and pedagogy, keep up to date with the latest in the field of educational technology, design and implement activities that improve the overall quality of education, ensure that the school and its students are kept in the know-how on the latest in the advances being made in technology, and be able to evaluate technological programs and their positive effects on the educational field.
• Web Engineer: As a web engineer in an educational setting, you must have proficient skill in several software applications and codes such as ASP.net, VB.net, XML Active X Technologies in addition to bringing a basic level of creativity for web communications. In addition, you are involved in overseeing and conducting research and development activities related to web portals and web applications.
• Performance Consultant: As a performance consultant, you formulate strategies to improve and nurture talent and performance and create and deliver reports to process managers. Your reports will involve technological performance indicators, data and metrics that allow for analysis and improvements.
• Distance Education Manager: As the title says, you are responsible for all aspects relevant to distance education, including the design, development and implementation of online, web-based and distance learning programs and the technology to be used in each of them. Many of these positions are found in higher education.
  

***This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of the computer programming college degree She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.

This post was edited by De Anna L Fench, eduTech gEEk writer.

Writers embracing writers

With my recent success and progression in both technical and screen writing, I am very happy to open eduTech gEEks up to guest bloggers.

Our first being Kelly Kilpatrick, a writer whose work focuses on computer programming college degrees.

~eduTech gEEks