We have been doing concept mapping as a note-taking tool for several years now. It was inevitable; the kids' have a tremendously visual homeschool mom.

Last year I found aout about a free software tool developed by a collaboration of universities. It is called Cmap and it is about as perfect a concept mapping solution as you can get. Not only is it easy to use, but is has loads of built in ways to share and collaborate the concept maps with others is you want to. You can see what we have done with it by linking in to our Cmap html versions at Tim's Portfolio Cmap or our Cmap Family Homepage

If anyone wants to come into my online classroom to get a free hour long class on how to use it like we have, let me know by e-mailing me of your interest at armoorefam@centurytel.net. We can set a time and I will send you a link to acces my live classroom on the net.

My kids started wanting MP3 Players a few years ago. They were a mystery to me at first. As near as I could tell they were just the next generation of music players - tapes, CD, MP3, right?

I am gradually coming to learn more about MP3, ipods, and the myriad of content that can be downloaded free from the internet. Of course, as a homeschooler, I am always looking to see how these broadcasts can benefit our homeschool. This wekend I am looking into educational podcasting. Basically, people make audio (and video too) files that they share on the net through their blogs. These can be downloaded to listen to on computers, portable MP3 players, or other cousin devices such as iPods, even the new breed of cell phones can be used to listen to podcasting files. Most of these are audio files, but as bandwidth and free file servers open up more opportunities there are increasing numbers of video podcasts.

If you don't want to dig around for blogs that have regular educational podcasters, you can go to podcast directories. A good one is Learn Out Loud at http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory. The podcast section is entirely free. You will find lectures, audio books, interviews, sermons, radio addresses, etc. Take a look.

Here are a few interesting ones that I have come across at Learn Out Loud:

Crackleback Short Stories Podcast

Classic short stories from such noteables as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, are currently listed in this podcats series. Look toward the bottom of the page to get the links to the individual stories.

Classic Books Alive

Has podcasts of Tom Sawyer broken up by chapter

Various Spanish Language Podcasts

All three of the podcast series here look interesting. One is a videocast on how to roll your r's.

There are many NOVA and PBS podcasts listed in their science section as well as many college lecture series in such subjects as anatomy, archaeology, astronomy, and more.

Teaching governemnet right now? Under the politics heading you can listen to the Presidential Weekly Radio Adresses, search for podcasts categorized by political orientation, or by contemporary issues.

Want to learn about the Byzantine Rulers? THis is just one of several history podcasts available.

Want to go digging around the net for more? Just do a websearch with audio specified as the type of search to be done.

Once you start enjoying these podcasts, you may even find you and your kids getting interested in making a few of your own to offer. Pretty much all the tools you will need are completely free. Just get a decent microphone for your computer; use your own or download the free audio program Audacity; make your program; upload to one of the many free, public file servers; and post a link to it on your blog. Make good ones regularly and you may want to set up the RSS feed on your blog so others can subscribe to what you produce to get automatic downloads for their convenience.

Well, I hope I have whet your appetite to look around at what is available in the internet and at Learn Out Loud that you can have your kids listen (or watch) on their computer or on their portable players.

Well, it does cost a little; Only $10 to join the National Arbor Day Foundation. But when you consider that they send you ten trees that they garantee will grow or they will replace them and they cover shipping them to you, come on, even at ten dollars to join that is a good deal. Plus you will get all kinds of educational material for your homeschool.

Go to http://www.arborday.org/shopping/Memberships/Memberships.cfm

to learn more.

With the Chirotoon's 'Make Your Own Radio Show' contest now officially underway, I hoped to really encourage homeschool kids to get to work and make a show to submit. A tool that you creative minds might need is a website that hosts sound effects. Go to:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/tagsView.php

I am bringing you in on the 'tags' page, but please do not think that these tags are the extent of what the collection contains. Take the 'search' link in the left column to search for a specific sound. For example, 'baby' doesn't even show up in the tags list, but if you go to the search page you will get 27 hits for baby sounds - gurgles, cries, drinking, laughing, etc. I am moving into the 'done with having babies' phase of life now, but it was really fun listening to all those little baby noises. :0)

I have been introducing several open source software items in the "free and Fantastic' category on my blog. Here is yet another open source, free program you can download, GIMP. Like Open Office, this is no wimply, watered down program. It is a very powerful tool that can be used for a large number of applications for home and homeschool.

GIMP is an image manipulation software. With it you can improve photos or create artistic images from scratch. You can download GIMP for Windows at http://www.gimp.org/windows/ or use this page to jump to the download for MAC or Linux.

Timothy, eleven years old, is a particular fan of GIMP. Here is an image he created to use as a desktop walpaper:

http://img37.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pulsev24zp.png

Many homeschool families are low income because they must survive on one paycheck. That means that many of you out there will qualify for government assistance to get your home insulated, weatherized, and fitted up with a variety of energy saving tools. For those of us that live in older homes that were not constructed to be weather wise, that can make for a significant long term hand up, not hand out, in finances.

We are participating in the program right now. Our house was built in the 1930's - before indoor plumbing was common. The bathroom was added onto the porch. LOL. We have been steadily working at house improvement projects since we moved in 4 years ago - completely redoing the entry/door into the foyer so the whole house wouldn't be a freezer in the winter, complete replacement of every inch of old wiring 9some was even original knob and tubing), fixing structural problems, tons of cosmetic improvements, fixing a ceiling that the previous owner stepped through creating a hole where you could see all the way to the attic gable, and much more. 

With the wiring done, which benefitted from the empty walls, next on the list was insulating the house. However, we reached the most critical step of getting insulation in the walls and above the ceilings at the same point of needing to have college tuition planning hitting peak - Gregory enters college this fall. No income tax refund money can be spared this year to the project. We figured that it would be years before we would be able to get finances freed up for insulating because in two more years we will have two in college. The very year they will graduate, we will have child number three start. Without insulation, our energy bills would be stuck at a high rate right when we really could use that savings.

Then we heard about the weatherization project. We applied and were acceppted. We were put on the list. OK, it is government here - paperwork and wait are a natural part of the process. But our turn finally came.

Visit one, two weeks ago, left us with a box of tools to make a begining - plate gaskets, a sample energy saving florescent light bulb, cards to check your water and refrigerator temperatures, energy saving night lights, a smoke detector, etc. The work was planned.

Last week the first crew came in and caulked, put up smoke and carbon monoxide detectors that talk, improved the seal on the entryway to the attic, added some trim work in the back and in the foyer to seal some openings, and installed several more of those florescent bulbs.

This week we are expecting the insulators to arrive. They will be adding blown in insulation into the walls and will lay insulation above the rooms with 11 foot ceilings. The other roooms have drop ceilings which act as an insulation in and of itself, so they will not need anything.

Already we can tell a difference. When the temperatures drop below freezing, as they did last night, the gas space heater runs continuously. Last night, it actually cycled. I cannot wait to see how much lower our power bill will be after the insulation gets put in. It has been running averaging $165/month ($110 for electric and $55 for gas) for a family of 6 and 2000 square feet of house to heat and cool.

Wondering if you too might qualify? They count the number of 'heads' living in the household and the monthly income to figure it. John's income is about $30K and we have a family of 6 members. We qualified, maybe you will too. It cannot hurt to try.

To learn more go to:  http://www.eere.energy.gov/weatherization/

Have you ever thought that if you could get a list of books that ranged from easy to read to difficult to read you could find a good reading level then let your child work through the list to improve reading ability?

You can use the free tool at

http://www.lexile.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?view=fa&tabindex=3&tabid=68

to do just that. Just select sort by lexile to arrange books by reading difficulty. You can also use this tool to find out how difficult a book in your home library or current public library books are. Just enter the book title or author to bring up the lexile number. The next thing you need to know is how do lexile numbers relate to grade levels. Here is a chart that I made that can help out. Just copy/paste it from the page that you will be linked to and print it out for future reference.

  Click on the thumbnail to see the image at full size.

Many online libraries of books are now on the internet. These are mostly out of copyright books that have had their pages scanned or have been converted to electronic text formats that will allow word searches, computer readers, and smaller file size.

My favorite is Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1  It is probably the largest collection of online books available. I am not bringing you in on the homepage, but rather bringing you in on the downloadable adio books page. This particular page has a good quantity of books that are read by human readers. If you look in the top section you will see the link to many more audio books that are recordings of computer read books. In the text section of the library are hundreds of thousands of books in dozens of languages. Every one of these resources are free. You can read them online, print them off, or download them to read or listen too. The search engine is very much like online card catalogues for libraries. You can search by author, title, or subject.

Additional online libraries:

http://www.bartleby.com/

http://www.blackmask.com/cgi-bin/newlinks/page.cgi?g=For_Girls_and_Boys%2Findex.html&d=1

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/title.html

http://www.srhs.sandi.net/BooksByTitle.htm

http://www.icdlbooks.org/icdl/SimpleSearchCategory

http://www.puritansermons.com/toc.htm

http://www.ccel.org/

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/storclas.html

http://www.storylineonline.net/storyline/ (streaming video)

http://www.talewins.com/Browzer/novels.htm

http://www.libraryspot.com/must/loc.htm

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html (math textbooks)

http://www.freebooks4doctors.com/fb/special.htm (medical books)

http://www.readprint.com/

http://www.literature.org/authors/

http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic93.htm

http://www.online-literature.com/

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html

A homeschool family has been giving away free downloads to old timey (out of copyright) radio programs for some time now. Sign up and every week or two you will get an e-mail with a link to get to that week's download(s). The radio programs range from children's stories to dramatized history. To sign up go to http://www.chirotoons.com

In addition to the old timey radio shows, they sponsor an annual 'Make Your Own Radio Show' contest. I heard last year's contest winner. It was sooo cute! The oldest daughter of the homeschool family read/narrated  'The Gift of the Magi' while younger siblings did sound effects and the lines of the two main characters. It was very enjoyable. If you think that your family would like to make an entry, go to

http://www.chirotoons.com/20063.html to learn more.

Do you ever wish that you could figure out what a word meant in the original Hebrew in the Bible. You could use the big book called Strong's Concordance and a King'James version of the Bible to look up the word number then use the dictionary section to look up the meaning. Great tools, but this seems to be a perfect task for a computer. Obviously, the creator of E-Sword thought so too. His motto is 'freely you recieve, freely you give'. You can download the really fantastic program he created for free from  http://www.e-sword.net/

Features:

There is a very useful notes feature that lets you type out your own personal notes on any verse you select. There is a helpful Scripture memory tool and a planner for reading through the Bible in a given time. The basic program comes preloaded with the King James Version and the Stong's Concordance/Dictionary. But, there are additional free downloads for you:

To get to these free additional add ons you will need to go to the download page and open the drop down menu near the top left. The additions are divided into groups: Translations, Commentaries, Extras, Dictionaries, Graphics, Devotions, and STEP Libraries. To get these, merely save the download to the same folder as the E-Sword. I made folders within this folder to house these, but you do nothave to do that. Once to download it merely run the program. these will self-install into your E-Sword.

Translations - Many, many English translations available. there are even translations in languages other than English.

Commentaries - Matthew Henry, Spurgeon, many more

Graphics: SonLight Atlas, chart collections, woodcut illustrations, even NASA satelite images, more.

Extras - Just off hand, I cannot remember what was in this category, but there were quite a few items

Devotions - Many famous ones

There are many programmers out there that have made some neat programs and use download sites to give away or sell them. These generally come in three flavors:

• Freeware - you can use, keep, and give away copies of these programs without cost.
•  
• Shareware - you can download them and try them for free. If you like them you can pay the author to keep the full program. The free trial version may be fully operational but you only get a specified number of days to use it or specific features may be disabled until you buy it.
•  
• Adware - You can use them for free, but ads for products and services are interspersed in the program.

Two sites that host huge numbers of these programs are

www.tucows.com

www.download.com

!!!!!  We have downloaded tons of these without a problem, but it is always a good idea to make sure that your antivirus and antispyware software is up to date and turned on before downloading and playing any of the software.  !!!!!

Here is a sampling of some of the programs, MP3s. videos, etc that I found on these sites:

• The downloads.com site has more than programs. It also has free how to videos. Here are a few video topics - several how to play guitar videos, several food prep videos, how to use some of the application oriented downloads that are offered on the site, and how to play golf videos.
•  
• download.com has over 4,000 programs in the category of home and education. Here are a few of them: math worksheet maker, a reward program to make a motivator that shows on the desktop of your kids' computers, many recipee managers, many flashcard makers, many typing programs, a program that uses the computer and mouse to teach kids handwriting letter formations, many foreign language tutors, countdown to an event desktop display, text to MP3 reader, Absolute Pitch program to help you learn to sing.
•  
• download.com has a lot of free music you can download (it is legitimately free). The music ranges from popular musicians that give away samples of their music to unknowns that are looking to build up a base of fans. Every taste and style is represented. My kids download a lot of Christian and instrumental music from here.

For those of us with college bound students, we face the intimidating task of tackling some hard subjects if we want to provide our kids with advanced placement courses. Advanced placement courses are basically courses equivalent in rigor and content to what college freshman do, but done during the high school years. These are terrific for gifted and students passionate in a specific subject area, giving a student a taste of college level work, and preparing students for CLEP exams.

The problem is that very few homeschool resources exist for AP courses. Enter the open courseware movement begun by MIT. MIT decided to make their classes open to the public. You do not get college credit, will generally not have access to the end of module exams, or access to the instructor, but you get all the content delivered via the internet. Several other universities have followed suit and made many of their courses open to the public too.

Here are a few links to universities that are pursuing open courseware:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html  This is MIT's open courseware. They have over 500 courses in the public domain.

http://www.cmu.edu/oli/ This one is Carnegie Mellon's open courseware site. I will give a review of some of theirs below.

http://ocw.usu.edu/Index/ECIndex_view Utah State's open courseware.

http://ocw.tufts.edu/?WT.mc_id=Link1 Tuft University

http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/browse.cfm World Lecture Hall - Texas University in Austin.

Let's take a closer look at a few of the courses from Carnegie Mellon just to get a taste of what these courses are like. Many of these are currently under development so you will need to look at the course a bit before rushing headlong into using them as the foundation for your AP course.

An example of this is the Physics course. At this point, the author cautions that it is developed enough to be an outstanding supplemental resource but that the 'online textbook' has not yet been added. Even as it stands, it is an excellent tool. It has over 350 computer tutored exercises using the Andes Physics Tutor developed at the University of Pittsberg and the Naval Academy. I taught a homeschool high school physics co-op last year and would have loved to have known about this. It would have made the math and physics so much easier to teach and understand.

Another course well on its way to being developed is Biology. This one has interactive computer scores quizes scattered through the reading content. It is a great way to check understanding on the fly. It uses Flashmole which is incredibly helpful with the chemistry side of things. You can litterally turn the molecules around to see them from every angle. There are interactives and Flash movies. A feature called 'Many Student's Wonder' gives student access to articles on topics that pop up in the content. These are kept distinct from the regular content because the student will not be tested on it. That allows interested students to go beyond yet not overload others who need to stay focused on the primary material.

Chemistry looks awesome, though when I browsed through the course last night there wrer many broken links. That might have been a temporary problem or it may be a sign that the course has been abandoned. It looks to be complete. Features of this course is an embedded virtual lab. The virtual lab gives you lab equipment and supplies that you can control virtually with your computer. I have used this software before and it is outstanding. The course is loaded with many Quicktime movies to demonstrate concepts.

I have used some of MIT's open courses in the past and can vouch for how useful they are. I particularly enjoyed the freshman physics course. You get to watch very enjoyable lectures. DSL or faster is highly advised. I was using dial up at the time. Dial up will give a stuttery movie which is particularly problematic when the professor is writing on the chalkboard. 

The Microsoft Office suite has become a standard with its MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. Once you have started tapping into the projects that can be made with some of the tools in your homeschool, it can become very useful and motivating for those kids who love computers. The problem for many has been the pricetag. well, it is a problem no more. Let me introduce you to Open Office. Open Office has everything that MS Office has and then some. It can open and save to Microsoft Office file formats.

We use PowerPoint quite a bit around here, but because of the MS Office price tag it is only on my machine. The kids just have to make an appointment with this machine when they want to make a presentation. When I added RAM to my system, suddenly Microsoft Office says I cannot use it until I use the disk - probably a security measure to catch illegal copies or sales of Office software. We have a legal installation, but it came preinstalled on our computer. The software is enmeshed in the system recovery disk. For some reason my computer will not even see that that disk is in my disk drive. In the middle of my frustration of not being able to restore MS Office, my son suggested I try Open Office. I really didn't expect much out of it. I figured that it would be a watered down copycat of MS Office. I must say, I have been astounded that it not only can do all that MS Office can do, but it goes well beyond it - and it is downloadable and free because it is an open source program. Volunteer programmers made it with the purpose of free distribution and flexible modification.

In addition to having MS Office-like programs in the suite it also has a very nice drawing program and a math equation/formula maker. You can learn more about it and get the link to the 91mb zip file download at www.openoffice.org.

If you are new to presentation makers (like PowerPoint or Open Office's Impress), you may find that both MS Office and Open Office are a bit lacking in examples. They have wizards and templates, but that isn't really very helpful to a complete novice who really needs to see completed examples to understand what the program can do in the homeschool setting. For those, here are some links to some websites with example files:

http://jc-schools.net/PPTs-socst.html

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line_powerpoint.htm

You will need to have installed Open Office, have Microsoft Power Point, or have downloaded the free PowerPoint viewer from the Microsoft Office website to see the examples posted on these two websites.

The internet is a vast supply of free homeschooling resources. It is quite possible that with a computer and internet access you can put together a fantastic curriculum K to college prep without spending a penny in additional funds. I am talking much more than just webpages. There is open courseware, downloadbale open source software, and more. I want to post about some of these in this category.

As I add posts to this category, you will be able to access Free and Fantastic posts in isolation by clicking 'Free and Fantastic in the categories section in my sidebar (to the right).