Free Educational Resources
Digital Resources for the Classroom are selected and FREE educational resources are preferred as listed in here, thanks to open and sharing empowered by the internet and so many contributors’ work ! Please also refer to the specific subjects for your needs : Math, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, Arts and Music, and Multimedia resources.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) has launched the Center for Student Work, an online collection of exemplary student projects. A collaborative project between HGSE and K-12 education nonprofit Expeditionary Learning (EL), the free resource includes videos, writing samples and other work designed to provide teachers foundations to create their own projects.
Over 100 rubrics are collected on this page “Assessment and Rubrics“, which includes support materials for assessments that work with the Common Core State Standards and rubrics for many different assessment products. It also contains some information on the creation of rubrics and assessment in general.
Looking for a specific resource or lesson plan? EducatorLabs is comprised of school librarians and media specialists who volunteer as curators and conservators of the scholastic web. They want to help you find the lesson plans you need! Use the Resource Request form here to request a resource packet, at no cost to you. Their main project for everyone is the Resource Bank: a growing archive of high quality reference points for educators and students.
The U.S. Departments of Education and Defense launched “Learning Registry,” an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web. It catalogs digital educational resources from a range of federal agencies and organizations, such as NASA, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, as well as other willing contributors from the academic, nonprofit, and commercial sectors.
While the best uses of the Learning Registry platform will result from the innovation of developers able to create content, tools and applications tailored to educators’ needs, you can experience the power of the Learning Registry right now using its simple search engine.
The new version of the Federal Registry for Educational Excellence (FREE) is powered by the Learning Registry, an open database for sharing digital learning resources. This partnership will provide our customers – educators, parents and students – with a broader inventory of educational materials from federal agencies and public and private organizations. More than 200,000 freely available resources are included in the new FREE. The new site incorporates responsive design for mobile devices. This means FREE looks great and works well for customers on smartphones and tablets.
What Works Clearinghouse (by U.S. Department of Education) – “The high volume of research on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education can make it difficult to interpret and apply the results. We review the research. Then, by focusing on the results from high-quality research, we try to answer the question “What works in education?” The goal is to provide educators with the information they need to make evidence-based decisions.” You can find information organized by subjects and topics. Topics are defined by intended outcome (such as improved math skills), intended population (such as students with learning disabilities), and types of interventions (such as school choice) that may improve student outcomes.
Doing What Works is built with the mission to translate research-based practices into practical tools to improve classroom instruction.
The Common Core Curriculum Map uses an intuitive interface to present in-depth thematic units plans and materials, roughly six per grade level that connects activities with skills outlined in the Common Core Curriculum. Common Core Curriculum Maps: Digital Resources: a nice list of online digital resources and tools for creating, collaborating, researching, and sharing.
Common Core Resources for Educators and Administrators (from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium)
- “The Ignite Show:” The Common Core of Success
Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Teachers Ignite produced special episodes of “The Ignite Show” featuring state teachers of the year bringing the Common Core into the classroom. These shows were developed by the National Network of State Teachers of the Year and The Hunt Institute in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the National PTA.
- “From the Page to the Classroom: Implementing the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy” and “From the Page to the Classroom: Implementing the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics”
These professional development videos were developed by the Council of Great City Schools for central office and school-based staff and teachers as an introduction to the instructional shifts required by the CCSS. The videos feature some of the content writers speaking about the CCSS at professional development conferences hosted by the Council.
- Share My Lesson
Developed by the American Federation of Teachers and TES Connect, Share My Lesson’s Common Core Information Center offers facts, figures, and tips about the CCSS and high-quality resources aligned to the standards across all subjects.
- Teaching Channel
Teaching Channel offers a free library of high-quality videos featuring real teachers demonstrating their best educational practices. The large library of CCSS videos includes tags that specify the exact standards to which a lesson is aligned.
- Common Core in Practice: Great Teachers Demonstrate Moving to Deeper Learning
America Achieves developed a series of videos demonstrating effective instruction aligned to the Common Core. These five videos show how teachers are putting the new standards into practice in their classrooms and how enthusiastically their students are responding.
- Student Achievement Partners
Student Achievement Partners’ website offers a variety of free, high-quality materials to help educators align their instruction to the Common Core State Standards and raise student achievement. Resources include materials and guides aligned to the standards, essential actions for school and district leaders, professional development modules, and information on how educators can support the CCSS outside of the school.
Developed by ASCD, the EduCore tool provides secondary teachers with high-quality teaching and learning resources aligned to the CCSS.
- NEA Common Core State Standards Toolkit
The National Education Association’s Common Core Working Group produced this toolkit to ensure members have the knowledge and understanding necessary to prepare for the implementation of CCSS.
Digital Chalkboard is an online community of California public school and district educators. California educators collaborate through group participation and discussions, upload educational classroom and administrative resources that help other educators access what works best in California schools and districts. As of the summer of 2014, over 70,000 educational resources have been contributed to the resource libraries. Both featured content providers from select non-profit organizations and approximately 19,000 California educators continue to contribute resources and collaborate. With the fall 2014 launch of the new site, over 300,000 additional digital resources have been added through a link to Learning Registry.
WebQuests originated at the San Diego State University Department of Educational Technology. A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. QuestGarden is an online authoring and hosting system for WebQuests. Since 2005, over 20,000 WebQuests have been created on the site. QuestGarden members can download WebQuests created by other teachers and adjust them to meet their specific needs. Instructors of courses and workshops can request that a group page be set up so that participants can give feedback to each other as they develop new WebQuests.
FindingEducation, it’s for teachers to find best education resources on the web , backed by findingDulcinea’s hand-selected and professionally edited education resource library. Teachers can manage, organize and share their links, and create web-based assignment their students. (FindingDulcinea is the creator of sweetsearch for students)
Science.gov searches over 45 databases and over 2000 selected websites from 14 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results. Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance.
AASL Lesson Plan Database – American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner Lesson Plan Database, a tool to support school librarians and other educators in teaching the essential learning skills defined in the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Users can search the database for lesson plans by learning standards and indicators, content topic, grade-level, resources used, type of lesson or schedule, keyword and much more.
Share My Lesson (SML) is a new digital platform developed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its British partner, TES Connect. In the free SML online community, educators can come together to access and share high-quality teaching resources. Designed by teachers, for teachers, Share My Lesson already includes more than 250,000 resources, and that number is growing rapidly as more educators get involved and add to the collection. The user-generated content is supplemented by tens of thousands of contributions from hundreds of content partners, such as Colorín Colorado, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Student Achievement Partners, the Teaching Channel and Education International.
Kids.gov is the official kids’ portal for the U.S. government. This giant repository links to over 2,000 web pages from various government agencies, schools, and educational organizations, all geared to the learning level and interest of kids.
SmithSonian Education – standards based lesson plans, activities, and teaching tools on art, history, science, and technology; also field trips, professional development, and access to Smithsonian museum collections and research
Learner.org – Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum, Annenberg Media’s multimedia resources help teachers increase their expertise in their fields and assist them in improving their teaching methods. “Interactive” provides educators and students with strategies, content and activities that can enhance learning in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Language art, Math and Cinema.
SAS Curriculum Pathways – funded by SAS and offered at no cost to US educators and students, it is designed to enhance student achievement and teacher effectiveness by providing Web-based curriculum resources in English, math, science, social studies/history and Spanish for Grade8-14; it contains over 200 InterActivities, 200 Web Inquiries, 600 Lessons and 4,000 Web Resources; there is a great tool “Writing Reviser” for students to revise their work.
PBS teachers is a site fulled of featured classroom resources, activities, TV programs, multimedia web content, and lesson plan ideas. It’s also a good site for teachers’ professional development and peer connection. PBS LearningMedia is a free multimedia portal featuring photos, maps, videos, and lesson plans.
Verizon Thinkfinity is a website supported by the Verizon Foundation and its partners – 11 of the nation’s leading education and literacy organizations, provides quality online resources available for teachers, parents, and students, all for free. www.thinkfinity.com , which acts as a gateway to all of the content partners’ high-quality online resources.
TeacherDomain is a mega site from the people at PBS station WGBH in Boston. It really is “an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from the best in public television, support materials, and tools to enhance classroom lessons and professional development activities. You can search this vast database of resources by subject and state standard.
TES is home to a vast library of teaching materials all created and uploaded by teachers from the TES community. With separate subject channels for every type of teacher from nursery through to post-16, there are all kinds of classroom materials including lesson plans, videos, PowerPoint presentations, games, puzzles, quizzes, worksheets and tutorials. It’s reported there are over one million monthly downloads and over 12 million resources shared on the TES Connect online community since its launch in August 2008.
K-12 Database – Online databases funded by the Texas legislature and available to all Texas public schools and public charter schools, access is 24/ 7/ 365 to students, teachers, parents and school leaders from school and home.
Interactive Activities on the UEN (Utah Education Network) site are grouped by grade clusters (k-2, 3-6, 7-12) and categorized into subjects, they are good resources for interactive whiteboards or students’ learning.
Google in Education has classroom tools, educators resources, Google Apps for edu. and a search engine for lesson plans.
California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) – One stop database of the standards-aligned software, video and Internet learning resources. CLRN experts have identified, reviewed and organized hundreds of Electronic Learning Resources (ELRs) in a searchable database that allows you to compare key features of selected resources. The Web Information Links (WILs) let you search or browse hundreds of free primary, secondary and reference resources. Electronic Learning Assessment Resources (ELARs) are data management programs that simplify delivery, aggregation and disaggregation of assessment data. It’s a project of California department of education.
The Kentucky Learning Depot is an online state repository of K-12 and postsecondary educational content, will be mapped to align with the K-12 common academic standards for mathematics and English/language arts, it has been sharing content, knowledge, and support with other states notably with partner repositories in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, who along with Kentucky are members of the Southern Regional Education Board, or SREB.
The British Museum offers 500 online objects and some awesome adventure games for youth to explore world histories and stories.
The Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science, & Reading and the Ohio Social Studies Resource Center are great curriculum sharing sites that align with state and national content standards.
The Gateway (formly known as GEM) was developed with funds from the U.S. Department of Education to provide teachers with learning resources created by over 750 publicly funded organizations. In 2005 the Gateway’s U.S. Dept. of Ed. funding ceased and the National Education Association stepped in to preserve this national education asset.
Thirteen Ed Online is developed by Thirteen/WNET New York, PBS’s flagship station. This free service features everything from standards-based lesson plans and classroom activities to a multimedia primer, online mentors, and reviews of curriculum-based Web sites.
The website “ipl2: Information You Can Trust” was launched by merging the collections of resources from the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites, which covers a wide range of learning resources, and age-appropriate areas for kids and teens. The site is hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science & Technology, and a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science. Have a question ? Ask an ipl2 librarian !
Free Teacher Resources from Discovery Education – Foster deeper engagement and opportunities for students to take charge of their own learning with high quality, engaging, relevant tools designed for today’s busy teachers and parents. Explore the programs and contests, interactive games, puzzles, lesson plans, videos and more organized in 4 main subjects and others.
Internet 4 Classrooms (“i4c”), a free web portal designed to assist anyone who wants to find high-quality, free Internet resources to use in classroom instruction, developing project ideas, reinforcing specific subject matter areas both in the class and at home and even for online technology tutorials.
4Teachers.org works to help teachers and administrators integrate technology into classrooms by offering free online tools, resources, and professional development. 4Teachers helps teachers locate and create ready-to-use Web lessons, quizzes, rubrics and classroom calendars.
TeachersFirst is a rich collection of lessons, units, and web resources designed to save teachers time by delivering just what they need in a practical, user-friendly, and ad-free format. We offer our own professional and classroom-ready content along with thousands of reviewed web resources. Free professional development resources for self-directed teachers are available.
Curriculumbits.com offer free online access to a growing range of interactive multimedia e-learning resources. The online Resource library contains games, quizzes, animations and videos in a variety of subjects. Resources have been produced according to key stage 3 and 4 of the UK National Curriculum for students aged 11 to 16.
Cybrary Man’s Educational Web Sites – The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents. Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.
Teacher Planet – with free access to 10000+ theme-based resources including lesson plans, templates, rubrics and worksheets.
Educational Technology Clearinghouse – quality education resources for Florida’s schools, made by FCIT (the Florida Center of Instructional Technology)
S.C.O.R.E. – a web-based classroom resources powerpoint slideshow, link to quality websites and teacher-developed lessons, a project supports California standards.
MiddleWeb – teaching resources for middle grades, supported by Stenhouse Publisher
EducationalFreeware – collected and reviewed high-quality free educational games, software and websites – mostly for kids, but also for grown-ups, there are a large selection of web-based software (check the Online tab), as well as Windows educational software to download (under the Downloads tab).
Teachnology has been providing free and easy-to-use resources for teachers for over one decade, including “Teacher Timesavers” to help educators better organize. The site also features 42,000-plus lesson plans, 9,000 free printable worksheets, rubrics, teaching tips, web quests, and other free teacher resources. The Best on the Web for teachers by Teach-nology.com.
GSSD Grade-Leveled Resources – Digital learning resources organized by grade levels, by Good Spirit School Division.
Lesson Planet – search engine for teachers, for educators to search from over 350,000+ teacher-reviewed online lesson plans and worksheets that are posted on the Web, but it’s not a free resource
EduHound offers thousands of free lessons that meet state and national standards and wen resources listed by categories.
Teachers.net – a site with lesson plans created by teachers for teachers, a ton of classroom projects in all subjects and grade levels can be found here too.
Edhelper – a great collection of educational resources on all subject areas. This is a paid service for a low cost which can be purchased in teacher packs of five as well.
WebExhibits, launched in 1999, is an interactive, online museum of science, humanities and cultures. There are resources for teaching.
Digital Learning Day: Resource Roundup from Edutopia
Searching for Resources to Teach the Common Standards from EdWeek
Free Resources and Tools for “Authentic” Assessment from Edutopia
Create Your Own Textbooks (Cybraryman)
The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet (MIT Technology Review)
If you want to simulate the Earth, you’ll need data on the climate, health, finance, economics, traffic and lots more. Here’s where to find it. Great list of data sources and other sites which could be of use to students and instructors alike.