Universal Access to Human Knowledge!

by Ed Latham

Have you ever wondered how to start a podcast? How about how to reduce a fraction to its lowest terms? Of course you are just dying to learn how to play the violin as well, right?

I have a few sites that may be useful for educators and some of these might not be filtered at your schools!!!!

Please note I am including free resources only. I know there are many very nice resources out there that offer tons of content, but I morally avoid those services as I strongly believe that resources (including apps on school computers) should be free for k-12 education! O.K. enough with the soap box, let's get to the movies...

Internet Archive : A collection of videos about many different topics. Some computer related stuff like iMovie and some more academic stuff like working with fractions. This is not a very friendly site so for total novices hit some of the other links below.

Teacher Tube: If you need a video lesson done up for some subject matter, it's probably already done for you here. Also some cute stuff posted by teachers to help us all laugh a bit. If you wish to record some of your lessons and post them ... this is the site to do it as teachers all over the world check into this site all the time... you could be famous!

University Texas: Many colleges are setting up video tutorials for staff and students. This site has many goodies that people often ask for help with.

I am sure there are tons of resources out there so feel free to add more to the list. PLEASE limit your offerings in this post to "how to" resources (videos are best). The other restriction is that the materials must be freely available; no trial offers or any of that nonsense!

Those of us that just compile tons of links without actually spending time at each link, I would encourage you to look through the link with the following mindset.

"I want to learn how to use/do X and I have only heard about it."

Please post only links that you would actually use or offer to family to help them learn how to independently use some application. I am anxious to see all the cool resources people have found out there.

How

I love libraries. Always have. Today the eMINTS mentors had our monthly meeting in the ATM room at the Bangor Public Library. Both Olga LaPlante and the Bangor Public Library Blog suggested VideoJug as a place to find video How-To's. Here's How to Make Creme Brulee.

Other How-To Sites:

How Things Work
How Stuff Works
eHOW
WikiHow
RefDesk: Do-It-Yourself
ExpertVillage