Over the last eighteen months I’ve created and offered seven free ebooks for teachers. In those ebooks I’ve covered Google tools, web search, video creation, blogging, and other resources of interest to educators. All seven of those ebooks are available in the right hand column of Free Technology for Teachers. This morning I’d like to highlight some other free ebooks created by others for teachers and parents.
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Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators also provides a good explanation of digital storytelling in general and the benefits of using digital storytelling in your classroom. You can download the ebook for free on Lulu. You can also purchase a paperback copy of the book for $8.50. I think $8.50 is too low of a price because I bet most people would happily pay twice that price.
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Terry Freedman served as the editor of the free ebook The Amazing Web 2.o Projects Book which is comprised of the contributions of 94 people. I took a look at the book last night and was impressed by what I found in the 121 pages of The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book. Within the book readers will find 87 web-based projects. Each project in the book has defined objectives, defined grade level or age range, links to additional information (including how-to’s) about the project, and tips for teachers planning to use the project.
Ana Maria Menezes offers a 53 page free ebook titled 20 WEBTOOLS Applied to Teaching. In addition to some well-known services like Animoto, Ana Maria has included some lesser-known tools that could be particulary useful for ESL/ELL instruction. You can download the ebook from Issuu. I also recommend browsing through Ana Maria’s blog, Life Feast, if you’ve never visited it.
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Edutopia offers a free PDF guide to improving communication between schools and parents. Edutopia’s Home-to-School Connections Guide features ten ideas that you can implement right away to improve your communications with parents. Some of the ideas included are using Facebook to connect, using Google Voice, and building partnerships with parents. Readers of this blog may recognize Larry Ferlazzo’s name in the section about building partnerships with parents. Overall, Edutopia’s Home-to-School Connections Guide offers good practical advice for improving communications between schools and parents.
Connect Safely, a resource reviewed last year on Free Technology for Teachers, offers a 32 page guide to Facebook for parents. A Parents’ Guide to Facebook is a soup-to-nuts guide to Facebook privacy settings, profile settings, group settings, and more. For parents who “just don’t get Facebook” the guide offers great explanations of the appeal of Facebook for teenagers and what teenagers do on Facebook. The guide provides a run down of recommended settings for teenagers and explanations of what those settings mean.
Own Your Space is a free, sixteen chapter ebook designed to educate tweens and teens about protecting themselves and their stuff online. This ebook isn’t a fluffy, general overview book. Each chapter goes into great detail explaining the technical threats that students’ computers face online as well as the personal threats to data that students can face online. For example, in the first chapter students learn about different types of malware and the importance of installing security patches to prevent malware infections. The fourteenth chapter explains the differences between secured and unsecured wireless networks, the potential dangers of an unsecured network, and how to lock-down a network. Download the whole book or individual chapters here.
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Getting Started with Ubuntu is a free 165 page ebook produced by a team of writers and editors. The manual covers everything an end-user would need to know about how to use Ubuntu. You can download the ebook for free or order it as a bound book from Lulu.