Open Culture Free Media Resources for Educators

Open Culture is a great resource of free cultural and educational media for educators. It is really one of my favourite resources online and I have already shared some of its  materials here and on other social media platforms. Open culture features five main tabs that we will review breifly below.

1- Audio Books

This is where you can download free audio books for free. It has hundreds of titles from fiction to poetry and lietrature.

2- Free Online Courses
This section features over 250 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. These courses are provided by the world' leading universities and can be downloaded into your computer or mp3 player.

3- Movies

This section features more than 300 online free movies organized into different sections such as : comedy an drama, horror and Hitchcok, silent films, documentaries and animations.

4- Learn 40 Languages

This collection features lessons in 40 languages including Spanisg, French, Italian..Lessons are availabe for download.

Head over to Open Culture and give it a try.

Watch this tutorial I made to Learn more.

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Evi Audio Search Engine for Android

Evi is a cool Android app. It provides answers for everything you ask her. It looks like a search engine but way smarter. If  a search engine only analyzes your word conbinations to give you back probable results you might even need, Evi  understands exactly what you want to know and provides you the best answers.

Evi can not perform really good until it gets to know you more. What you like , your location. So the more you ask her the better she gets to constitute a general idea about your likes and dislikes. There is a voice functionality that lets you chat to Evi in plain English. It is not like Siri for the iPhone 4s but can understand you pretty well.

Some features of Evi

Here is a list of the main features that Evi offers to its users:

• It is free
• It requires Android 2.2and up
• It provides information such as :shopping, news,..etc
• Evi  has a built in browser to help you access all the links in one place without having to swap browsers
• Evi can  understand you and provide you with the best answers
• You can chat to Evi and get instant results

Watch this video to learn more about Evi






Here are some screenshots of Evi

Head over to Android market and download Evi

Don't forget to check out more apps from The Best of Mobile Technology

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See Algebra in Real Life with Get The Math

Get The Math is a great website that provides students and teachers with real world mathematical challenges. The website includes Algebra-based videos and tutorials done by  professionals in the domaine.The aim behind this service besides helping learners grap maths notions is to contexualise the teaching of this subject.
Many learners think that math is an abstract set of operations and rules that might not have any direct implimentation in the real contexts. This is being refuted by a number of tutorials in Get The Math that try to put the challenges in the context of the real world scenarios which are mainly Fashion design, Video game design, and Music production.

Each section features experts explaining how math is being used in their professions. What is even cool about this website is that it provides at the end of each video a series of challenges for students to work on. Head over to Get The Math and give it a try.

Head over to Get The Math and learn more

Here is an example of Math in music

Watch Get The Math - Math in Music Intro on PBS. See more from THIRTEEN Kids.

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Three Free Tools to Create Free Study Groups Online

Collaborative platforms are among those urgent digital tools that our students need to be familiar with. They are a great source of motivation, creativity and interaction. Sometimes we might under estimate what our learners can do but when they are given the proper tools and enough margin of movement they can really amaze us.
Below is a list of three free collaborative tools to begin with.  You can use them  with your students in the classroom.

1-Thinkbinder

Thinkbinder is a free collabortive platfrom where students can easily create study groups. The website also features an open space or what is called a whiteboard where learners can work collaboratively together in solving problems and sharing sketches. Using Thinkbinder , students will be able to chat with each other, share links and resources, share videos and presentations and many more.

2- Dweeber

Dweeber is another collaborative platform that is designed to help students work on their homework. This website requires a free sign up and once students are logged in then they can instantly start building up their community of learners . There is a whiteboard for learners to work and collaborate on doing home work.

3-Scribblar

Scribblar is an online meeting platform. It is like the previuos tools for it allows its users to work collaboratively using a whiteboard. It also provides tools for learners to create text, draw lines and add images. Scribblar supports PDF files and allows students to upload  PDFs with up to 5 pages.

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How Educators, Teachers,Students Use Evernote

Evernote is a great web service not only for teacher and educators but for all internet users. I have already covered this tool in one of my posts here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning almost a year ago and today I am updating it via adding another important feature that has just been included in the Evernote service.

As you know Evernote allows its users to bookmark their websites and access them wherever they are. It has now a mobile app that is free and works on both iOS and Android devices. I personally used to use Google Bookmarks to do all the bookmarking but have switched now to Evernote because it offers way more features than Google Bookmarks. I really do like the tagging and sorting options available in Evernote.

As I said earlier there is a new feature being added to Evernote called  Evernote for Education. This is basically a page devoted for education topics. They provide samples of how Evernote is being used by educators, students, and teachers from all around the globe. There is a webinar there explaining in depth how students and teachers can use this service. Head over to Evernote for Education to learn more.

Watch this video to learn more about Evernote


Evernote for education webinar from Ronald Toledo on Vimeo.

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Write Your Own Textbook with Apple's iBooks Author App

                        This is a guest post by Samantha Peters from The Education Update


I just got an email from Samantha who is the guest writer of this post asking me to delete this post. It looks like this article has already been publsihed somewhere else and keeping it here means duplicate content which I wont accept. Only unique articles are accepted for guest posting.

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Literature Map Find Authors you Like

Literature Map is as its name suggests,a service that provides names of authors based on your search keywords. If you like an author and constantly read his works and want to discover other similar authors that more or less have the same style of writing or probably focus on the same themes as your original author then all you need to do is type in the name of the author and Literature Map will provide you with a diagram like map of the names of other similar authors.

This is a cool website for teachers. They can use it with their students to look for authors similar to the ones they have in their curriculum. I would also recommend another website which slightly resembles Literature Map, it is called Novels on  Location. This latter allows users to find novels based on the locations they type in in a map. Check it out too you might like it.

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