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.

This morning I’m writing from SeaTac Airport en route from Vancouver Island to Minneapolis for Closing the Gap. At the conference, my colleague Jane Rondow and I will be presenting a session entitled “Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education“. Imagine that! If by chance you are going to be at the conference, please stop by and say hello. Our session is scheduled for 8 o’clock on Thursday morning. I won’t be at all offended if you just pop in and say Hi, and then dash off to another session. On the weekend I spent a few minutes looking at some of the information that is available at Google Analytics. I was blown away to discover that there are 650 of you out there somewhere who have visited my blog more than 50 times this year. That got me to thinking that some of you just might be at Closing the Gap.

Software.For The folks at “Software for Starving Students” are people after my own heart. From their website, you can download a CD full of free software for installation on your own computer. I’ve contemplated doing something similar with some titles from my own collection of free software. Now I at least know that it can be done. Here’s what SSS says about what it is doing.

“Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a full-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.”

I used uTorrent to download the Windows CD. The download of the ISO file worked flawlessly, and took remarkably little time. Then I used the instructions provided by Petri IT Knowledgebase to turn the ISO file into a self-booting CD. The download even included a pretty cool CD label that I printed and used.

The following software titles are included on both the OSX and Windows versions of the CD: Audacity; Blender; Celestia; Firefox; GeoGebra; Stellarium; Thunderbird. There are quite a few other programs specifically for Windows or OSX.

The work being done by SSS deserves to be publicized and supported. I think I’ll probably make a donation to their noble cause!