The cost of free courseware

I acceptable got an email from the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) undertaking. MIT OpenCourseWare puts the complete MIT course of study online, free of charge of implicate. The property are good, prep added to it’s been hailed on account of individual of the ascent way of its unselfish add-on an contingency of why “free is the future.”

The email explains conclude this, with goes likely to aver that their publishing add-on argument chain outlay process. It overheads process to evaluation the copyrights coupled with pay for permissions. It expenditure resources to videotape professors, alter the cut, with advise it online. Bandwidth prep added to servers are not free.

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Caveat Emptor? Unless It?s Free

As I have been working to create UbD plans over the last couple of days, a couple of things have become glaringly obvious to me.

The first is that the quality of available study guides and teachers’ guides varies widely.  Most of them only have a handful of “good” lesson plans.  What I mean by “good” is that I can use the plans without too much modification for my students, it is sufficiently challenging for high school, and it doesn’t involve too much of what I think of as “fluffy” work.   I am totally all for using what I can without reinventing the wheel.  My English Education professors encouraged us to steal, steal, steal.  This was back in the day when listservs were well-populated and would have been great for teachers to share ideas, but teachers weren’t on them, and it was well before the age of blogs, wikis, webquests, etc.  Our best source for ideas, if I recall, was ERIC.  I had to create entire units by myself, stealing where I could, but mostly finding I had to buy anything that was really helpful (Perfection Learning units, Shakespeare Set Free, Novel Guides, etc.)  It was a pain, and I envy new teachers for the fact that they have access to the Internet with this wealth of ideas.  It must be much easier to create plans now than it used to be.

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Free sound effects for multimedia projects or podcasts

From Wesley Freyer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity…

The best list I’ve seen lately is Hall Davidson’s, which he has shared as a Word document and linked from his Kit Building page.

Another resource to know about is Acid Planet’s free 8 packs of loops. They share a new 8 pack to download for free every week. I have these and other resources listed on my Free Audio Resources page.

Remind students that audio, music, and even short sound effects are intellectual property just like pictures. More information on copyright and citing sources can be found in the resources and activities in the GenYES and TechYES teacher guides.

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Free Wikis for Educators

Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.

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Webcast Academy - Free lessons in a learning community

Interested in learning how to host and manage live webcasts? Join the Webcast Academy - free lessons and an active community of people interested in producing and hosting their own webcasts.

There is a new series of classes at what they call the “intern” level (free for educators) starting January 13, 2008. (More info here.) There are six weeks of online classes lead by experienced facillitators, and you get a Webcast Academy ‘Certificate of Webcasting Proficiency’ on completion. The class gives you free access to some tools, space to upload projects, and what looks like a very supportive and friendly community of like-minded learners.

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Free online seminar - Bringing Learning to Life through Service Learning

Free Online Seminar

Bring Learning to Life: Reaching, Teaching, and Engaging Adolescents through Service-Learning with Cathryn Berger Kaye

January 22, 3:00 PM eastern/2:00 PM central/1:00 PM mountain/12 noon pacificJanuary 23, 6:00 PM eastern/5:00 PM central/4:00 PM mountain/3:00 PM pacific

from: NSLP CONNECTIONS

Across the United States, middle school students are transforming their ideas, energy, and enthusiasm into civic action connected to their academic learning. The process? Service-learning. When students are given opportunities to apply content knowledge and skills to address pressing community needs, they begin to see classroom learning as having purpose and relevance to the world in which they live. Learning comes to life.

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Free online journals

There’s an excellent post pointing to Free online journals on Martin Terre Blanche’s Collaborative Learning Environments.

I got lost in the maze as I was wandering through some really good journals. I did come across an article listed under ‘current practice’in E-Journal of Instructional Science & Technology . It was ‘Blogs as Electronic Learning Journals’ by Laurie Armstrong and Dr. Marsha Berry.

BibMe, the fully automatic and free bibliography maker

It’s no secret I am interested in managing my citations online. You can read about my previous adventures here and here. I ultimately settled on NoodleTools, which I have now used through hundreds of APA 5th edition citations and my profs made only minor corrections which could have been corrected by my input being better on the front end.

So I took notice when lifehacker mentioned BibMe. I sat up when I saw the interface, very clean and a nice use of graphics. NoodleTools’ interface is just slightly clunky and not terribly web 2.0ey. No sweat, Noodle, you make up for it in functionality.

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