Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

Today I’m featuring a remarkable resource that has been made available to the world by a school in Courtenay, British Columbia. This online library is a tribute to the vision, talent and effort of Stewart Savard, the school’s librarian. It so happens that Courtenay is where I live, and it’s an honour to know Stew, and to get to work with him on occasion.

Courtenay Middle School Library (online resource) The growing collection of digital resources housed on this Vancouver Island middle school’s website is truly remarkable. In addition to some resources that you can download, there’s an extensive and well organized catalogue of links to some of the very best online resources available anywhere.

There is much of value here to middle school learners and their teachers everywhere. By virtue of the multiple ways that users can access material on the site, and because of way the library identifies the reading level of the material, the library is built firmly on UDL principles. (UDL= Universal Design for Learning)

Downhill skiing has provided the model for rating the degree of reading challenge for each catelogued item, as illustrated below:

Material is organized by unit under main subject headings and sub-headings. For example, under Social Studies, there are four main sub-headings: History; Current Events; Geography; Research Topics. Under History, you then find the following units: Ancient China; Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece; Early Humans; Indian Empires; Mesopotamia; Middle Ages; Mongol Empire; Renaissance; Roman Empire. For each of these units, resources are organized under a helpful Table of Contents.

There’s a terrific Free Audio Book collection, with links to audio files of recorded human readers. There’s also a collection of novels available for “Assisted Reading“. The latter includes text files that can be downloaded for use with e-text reading software, as well as some KESI files that open in Kurzweil 3000. KESI files are available to download for some of the material catalogued under other subject headings as well.

There is much more at Courtenay Middle School’s online library, but no description I offer would do it justice. It needs to be explored and used to be fully appreciated.