Open Educational Resources (OER) - As textbooks are starting to phase out of the classroom, many online education communities are offering free, open-source instructional materials for K-12.
SITES TO CREATE:
- Curriki -Curriki is more than your average website; we're a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world.
- CK-12 Foundation - Home - CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.
- HippoCampus -HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.
- Open Educational Resources- In a brave new world of learning, OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.
- MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)- Putting Educational Innovations Into Practice-Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.
- Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 34,892 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!
- Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:
- authors create and collaborate
- instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
- learners find and explore content
- Creative Commons - Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally- Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration.
- CafeScribe http://www.cafescribe.com/home/ Find your textbook in electronic format.
- California Learning Resources Network This one is from California and is a free digital textbook site. The books I looked at were great. They have training materials and if my memory is correct this is the one when you "adopt" a book you can change the order of the chapters or even delete chapters that you won't use.
- Flat World Knowledge -They preserve the best of the old — books by leading experts, peer‑reviewed and developed to high editorial standards, fully supported by review copies, teaching supplements and great service. Then we change everything. Our textbooks are:
- Free online
- Affordable offline
- Open–licensed
- Customizable by educators