Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight free downloadable programs and online resources of good quality that may be of value to educators and their students, especially those involved in special education.

Why, oh why do so many folks persist in using Internet Explorer?!? New add-ons that make Firefox invaluable as an educational tool, and that make it ever more accessible, just keep rolling out. Firefox is a wonderful illustration of the powerful potential of open source code; and HyperWords is a brilliant new add-on for Firefox. (Firefox add-ons are what used to be known as Firefox extensions.)

HyperWords (Downloadable Firefox Add-on) Once Hyperwords is activated, whenever you double-click on any word on a web page, a pop-up menu appears. This highly configurable menu offers an extensive range of options for the word. A partial list of these options includes: dictionary definitions or encyclopedia articles; searches; translations; unit conversions; maps. It is noteworthy that all menu commands can be activated with keyboard shortcuts.

Hyperwords comes with a tool-bar that installs on the main Firefox toolbar, but I did not find this helpful. It was easy to uninstall it by going to the Tools Menu, selecting Add-0ns, going to Hyperwords and hitting the Options button. This button opens the door to numerous ways of personalizing Hyperwords.

The folks at The HyperWords Project have put together the following helpful 1-minute demo video:

It is worth noting that HyperWords is by far the easiest Firefox extension that I’ve ever installed. All you do is go to their website (in Firefox, of course) click on the button that says “Activate HyperWords”, and then follow the on-screen prompts.

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