I’m continually amazed at everything that can be found on the Internet. We’ve had discussions in the K-12 environment about shrinking textbook funds and have rhetorically asked if textbooks are needed with the wealth of materials online. Given some of these resources that are available from the higher education community and other free resources, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see more K-12 entities work to deliver instruction without traditional textbooks. A list of resources:
Project Gutenberg – One of the early entries in the ‘free books’ genre. You can find 30,000 free books to download here (free because their copyright has expired).
MIT Open Courseware – Want to take a course at MIT? This may not get you access to the instructor, but many of the materials used in all sorts of undergraduate and graduate MIT courses can be found at this site.
Google Scholar – Ever wished your students would find and reference ‘scholarly’ resources when searching Google for various projects? How about trying this beta search engine that seeks to limit your searches to scholarly literature?
Good stuff!