Teacher Education

Created and maintained by the American Federation of Teachers, Share My Lesson is a community of teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, specialized instructional support personnel, higher education faculty, and parents and caregivers who contribute content, collaborate, and stay up to date on the issues that matter to students and educators everywhere.

The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students―an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond.

CK-12 offers open lessons for K-12 students, including (but not limited to) Elementary through High School Science, Social Studies, and Math courses. With both conventional lessons and interactive ones, teachers can utilize the free content directly on their website or pull lessons from the site to customize them for their particular class. Further, CK-12 has translations of their content in 6 additional languages!

Illustrative Mathematics (IM), founded at the University of Arizona, features full math curricula for Elementary, Middle, and High School math courses. Each IM open curriculum, licensed under CC BY, features full-length lessons, teacher preparation guides, and practice problems for students. IM partners with several curriculum agencies and institutions to provide their material to schools nationwide, and each curriculum is aligned with college-readiness standards.

This Living Library is a principal hub of the LibreTexts project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books.

MERLOT, or Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, is a collection of free and open online educational resources (OER) for teaching, learning, and faculty development. Through this link, you will find more than 6,000 open materials for students in K-12.

This page contains links to stories and books for a young audience.

Digital librarians at OER Commons have curated collections of kindergarten through high school resources and full courses to help leverage OER for your students. Whether you are looking for resources your students can complete at home, or dynamic content to inspire your own teaching and learning practice, this hub, organized by education level, subject, and content provider will help you discover the resources you need. Explore the grade level, subject, and provider collections below. Once you click on a collection, you can refine the collections by selecting different fields, such as material types, on the left side of the page, under Filter Resources.

OER Project empowers teachers to better serve their students through FREE, innovative curricula and a variety of teaching tools. We offer the following social studies courses, suitable for a range of age levels and adaptable to a variety of state standards.

Partnered with the University of Utah, the Utah Middle School Math Project is just that—a simple, easy to use site featuring open middle school math materials, including full textbooks and workbooks for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Each textbook, workbook, and corresponding teacher workbook is provided in a PDF version under CC BY, available for the public to download, edit, and redistribute.

LibreTexts is “a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning.” The site now contains resources for thirteen subject areas and its content has been adopted for more than 150 courses. Each subject area in LibreTexts contains a mix of content such as texts, homework exercises, interactive applications, visualizations and simulations, laboratory experiments, and worksheets. Although the resource still leans toward the physical sciences, it also carries materials for mathematics and statistics.

MyOpenMath, “a free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields,” is an exceptional example of a tool for sharing open ancillary materials. The site does require a login to ensure that only instructors can access the answers to exercises, but otherwise, its content is open and free to access.

At the NASA 3D Resources site, you'll find a growing collection of 3D models, textures, and images from inside NASA. All of these resources are free to download and use.

The Naturalis Biodiversity Center is the Netherlands' national research institute for biodiversity. It has over 43 million objects in its collection, which is used to study nature and address issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. The Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands made its museum virtually accessible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Visitors can explore the museum's exhibitions virtually, moving freely through them.

This Project-Based Learning format allows students to shape their own directions of inquiry in each project, development of skills, and collegial support.

In 2017, one of the most popular open textbook publishers, OpenStax, teamed up with OER Commons, one of the most popular OER repositories. The OER Commons Hub is a venue for instructors to share ancillary materials that they have created to pair with OpenStax textbooks.

Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed photos, illustrations, and audio clips.

Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

This site is one of many ways to access the Smithsonian's 3D content which covers an array of topics such as sports, portraiture, fashion, and outer space. You're welcome to freely explore or check out one of our curated collections. While you’re here, don't forget to stop by the Labs page to play with some of our latest experiments!

StoryWeaver is a nonprofit platform that provides free access to multilingual children's books. Users can read, download, print, translate, and create new stories. Since a digital story has no boundaries, your story can be read by people across the world. StoryWeaver also offers resources for teachers and schools, including reading programs, book lists, and weekly reading events.