Amidst all the noise on the internet there are many true gems: sites that are quality educational resources, or supply primary source information useful for scholarly or student research. Needless to say, there are too many to list in this lesson or course.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are essentially any quality resource usable by students to learn something. "Quality" is key; they are generally produced by educators, researchers, professionals, or perhaps students under the formers' supervision. "Open" is also important. These are at sites that do not require subscription to see and use. OERs have been the subject of a lot of hype, but their use has steadily increased in college courses. Even new textbooks frequently point them out to students. Some examples of OERs include:
Geogrebra for Mathematics. https://www.geogebra.org/
The Transatlantic Slave Database at https://www.slavevoyages.org/ .
Art and cultural exhibits hosted by Google Arts & Culture.
The Open Textbook Library. Your discipline or course subject may have a free, collaboratively-developed textbook option. If you struggle with wanting to skip parts of textbooks but hesitate due to the high cost charged to students, this is a way to assign a few readings from a book guilt-free!
scholar.google.com is a search engine that focuses on scholarly and research publications. You'd be surprised how many academics put their publications on the web, downloadable for free.
YouTube, a Google property, is a popular video sharing site. Many users, including faculty, government agencies, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and even just hobbyists have uploaded an enormous quantity of educational content there. (We'll talk about professors using YouTube in a minute!) On YouTube, not only can you find things beneficial for your students, you can also find helpful tutorials on using or troubleshooting technology. videos are organized into "channels," and many channels are maintained by educational and professional organizations, or even government agencies.
Governments, educational institutions, businesses, educational and civic organizations, and even individual researchers have provided a wealth of data on the internet. Again, it's too much to catalog here, but below are some examples:
Canisius Digital Humanities Resource. An extensive list of tools and resources focused in, but not exclusively digital humanities.
Richard Byrne's Free Tech 4 Teachers. Although Byrne teaches K-12, he occasionally has content resources-and tools-useful for college faculty.
World is Open Resources. Curtis Bonk has put together a comprehensive list of free Web resources that supplement his book: The World is Open.
MIT OpenCourseWare is repository of materials used in almost all MIT courses and may include syllabi, lecture notes, problem and answer sets, labs, readings and reading lists, videos, special features and more.
The New York Times, a daily newspaper founded in 1851, is widely regarded as a national newspaper of record. In addition to a series of podcasts, they offer video resources as well.
OpenLearn Courseware from Open University gives free access to Open University course materials.
Wisc-Online, or the Wisconsin Online Resource Center, is a digital library of Web-based learning resources called "learning objects." Other colleges, universities, and consortia from throughout the United States and around the world use the library with permission.
MERLOT. Here, find peer-reviewed online teaching and learning materials.
TED Talks are part of a now-famous series of presentations, usually under 20 minutes, that are free to the world. Often TED presenters are scholarly or professional experts in their field, but they discuss issues in language accessible for the lay public (and undergraduates.)
storymaps and sharemap.org. Using these, teachers and students can generate custom flat or interactive maps with easy-to-use tools. Invasion of America is an example of this.
You may find some of the above useful. More likely, you can find these resources in your discipline or subject by asking colleagues, librarians, professional organizations, and perhaps contacts in business, government, and non-profit sectors.