Features:
Downloadable video lectures (17,000+)
Animations (400+)
Live tests
Lecture notes
Power points (350+)
Subjects:
Biology
Physics
Chemistry
Math
Computer Science
History
Medical
Nursing
Engineering
Accounting
Management
Psychology
Literature
Language
Law
Economics
Education
Philosophy
Communication
Astronomy
Political Science
Features:
Videos - give intuition rather than formulas to memorize
Growing userbase and active forums
450+ Lessons
Animation
Interactivity
Entire curriculum
Web based software
Study site for K-8th grade with a Spanish version.
Subjects Covered:
K-8th grade math topics up to geometry and algebra
Spelling
Vocabulary
States of the USA
World Nations
Features:
Interactive practice with games and pictures
Customizable spelling and vocabulary lists (1st-8th grade)
Math articles
Flags, capitals, states, and nations worksheets and exercises
Resources from Microsoft for:
Web development
Game development
Phone development
Cloud development
Data development
Desktop development
Programming languages
Whole bunch of free, online, computer science books, textbooks, and lecture notes. Also has a few on math.
Subjects:
Computer Science
- Intro to computer science (22 books)
- Algorithms and data structures (30)
- Object oriented programming (13)
- Theory of computation (18)
- Formal methods (20)
- Functional programming (17)
- Logic programming (12)
- Artificial intelligence (22)
- Computer vision (19)
- Compiler design and construction (19)
- Computer organization and architecture (15)
- Parallel computing (7)
- Concurrent programming (3)
- Operating systems (16)
- Data communication and networks (16)
- Information security (22)
- Information theory (6)
- Digital libraries (22)
- Information systems (10)
- Software engineering (51)
- Game development and multimedia (16)
- Web design and development (10)
- Unix (2)
- Linux (50)
- iPhone iOS 4 (4)
- FreeBSD (4)
- Signal processing (17)
- + more
Articles and study help about everything. Best known for their literature notes, but their other stuff is pretty great. Can get distracted by the non-academic related articles but you should be fine if you stay in the academic pat of the site.
Features:
College resources:
- College reviews
- College video tours
- General college articles
Articles:
- 25+ subjects, in depth coverage
- Famous SparkNotes Lit. guides
- Famous "No Fear" Lit. series including Shakespere and other classics
Online bibliography maker. Put in the format of the bibliography you need, the sources and other information, and it ejects a clean, error-free bibliography, given you put in correct info.
Interactive timeline of history: "Over 2000 files covering 3000 years of history"
Features: Maps, biographies, catagorization of events by science, politics, religion, war, culture, and time periods, free online textbook and other resources.
Everyone tells you not to go to Wikipedia for information, but we all do anyway. Here's some free educational stuff with liks to even more.
Subjects: Everything
Features: Articles, links, pictures, lesson plans, ordered curriculum, vast amount of topics in each topic.
Amount of resources on site: 17,000+
Features:
- Articles on sperate events
- Biographies
- Timeline - Can view by period, 100 year span, or even modern, up to date, day by day events.
- Commentaries
- Book and movie summeries
- Maps
Computer Science
- Into to CS
- Operating systems
- Anti spyware
- Multimedia presentation
- Information management
- 2d imaging
- 3d imaging
- Word processing
- Internet search
- Google toolbar
- Keyboarding
- Computer and internet saftey
- Spreadsheets
MIT is often credited with having inspired the whole open courseware movement! The university has been publishing their course materials online for years now. These are not MOOCs, this is all of MIT's course content organized by course. You're responsible for buying any class textbooks if there isn't an online version. The content is easy to maneuver and a syllabus is supplied for each class. There are over 2,200 courses available on the site. MIT OCW recently launched an initiative aimed at high school students. This sister site highlights the best OCW content for high school students looking to get an edge on exams or just explore an academic interest.
Khan Academy is arguably the world's most popular learning website. Originally hosting math videos, Khan Academy has now expanded to include videos on biology, chemistry, physics, health and medicine, cosmology and astronomy, art history, civics, government, finance, computer science, economics, history, test prep, and music.
The site makes it beautifully simple to begin the process of learning a new math topic or refresh yourself on various subjects you haven't touched for years. The built-in learning environment tracks your progress and you have the ability to add students and view their progress. You're able to track how much of each topic (geometry, trig, algebra) you (or your students) have mastered separately as well as view how much of the entire subject (math) they've successfully got under their belts.
Most of the videos are between 5 and 15 minutes, making them easily digestible. In addition, there are practice questions to help solidify learning. The site is gamified: points are earned for watching videos and for completing practice questions. You can earn badges and view charts of your points earned over time. If you take a look at the site's gamification, you'' easily be able to see how using Khan in your homeschool could possibly spark a little friendly competition among your students.
I have used Khan Academy since it's early days. In high school, (I was homeschooled) I watched Khan Academy videos when I was still foggy on a topic that my curriculum covered, but maybe didn't explain as clearly as Sal Khan, the founder and the teacher in many of the videos, tends to. In college, I used Khan Academy to cram for math exams. The cramming itself is not admirable, but Khan helped make it effective.
One of my personal favorite bits about the videos is that Mr. Khan loves to explain WHY something works the way it does (an unlikely-looking math equivalency, for example) instead of just insisting that we do it that way because "that's how it's done", something I've heard from too many teachers who can't be bothered to explain the concept further. Also, Khan explains everything as clearly as humanly possible without being dull, which is wonderfully uncommon in and of itself. Here's a video from Khan Academy about the birth of stars to illustrate my point:
Khan Academy is potentially a priceless homeschooling tool. The quality and quantity of resources here are difficult to match, even with a paid curriculum. I would recommend it as a supplement to any of the subjects available on the site. I'd argue that it cannot be standalone curriculum because sometimes the practice questions lack breadth. But it is undoubtedly a wonderful homeschooling resource: it is almost a free tutor who knows everything about almost) everything.