Exploring the World of Free Teaching Productivity Resources on the Web

There are so many free productivity tools available on the Internet for today’s educators. I’m creating a resource page that list many of the most useful ones, and I’d love to have your input!

By “productivity” tools and resources, I am referring to tools that can help teachers get their jobs done more efficiently or effectively, at no cost (beyond the effort required to use the resources, of course). There are so many of these types of tools out on the Internet – sites providing free lesson materials, quiz and test banks, worksheets and flash cards, and much more.

It would be nice to have a page on EmergingEdTech.com where I would collect and organize links to good quality sites like this as I come across them, a page that educators could reference any time that they are looking for these types of resources. My goal with this series of posts is to lay a foundation for such a page – a list of free productivity resources intended specifically for educators, grouped into logical categories. I will limit the listing to better quality sites (those with more resources, better organization, easier use, etc.), and update it regularly.

I did a lot of searching around the ‘net for this sort of thing over the long holiday weekend, and developed a list of categories, with some example sites for each category. Defining these categories and organizing them in an informative way seems to me to be the biggest challenge here – once the categories are in place, it’s easy to find and add listings of sites. I realize there are many sites out there that offer similar listings, but most of them don’t seem to be very well organized. I am hopeful that you, the reader, will share your ideas and input, and help me expand and organize this listing to make it highly useful.

Here’s my first draft of some categories, with examples of each (if you know of better resources in these categories, please comment and let us know about them!):

Activity & Materials Creators