With cuts to school budgets, teachers are often left searching for ways to innovate without breaking the bank. In fact, a recent survey reveals that educators are incorporating more internet-related resources into their lessons, but shrinking school budgets have prompted many educators to look for free resources to enhance their lessons.
There are numerous sites that can help, but we’ve picked 10 that our among our favorites. Click through to browse our list, and then tell us what some of your favorites are in the comments section.
Academic Earth offers video lectures from elite universities, and it allows viewers to grade the professors. Academic Earth also offers a “Playlists” feature based around themes such as “Laws of Nature,” “Wars Throughout History,” or “You Are What You Eat.”
Curriki helps connect educators, parents, and students in the development of curriculum and other educational materials. With its open-source curriculum format, Curriki allows anyone to post their teaching ideas for others to view, download, use, reformat, and reshare.
FREE, or Federal Resources for Educational Excellence, is a U.S. Department of Education website that compiles free teacher resources available from dozens of federal agencies. Educators can sign up for the FREE RSS feed, which notifies users when new resources are added. Otherwise, they can browse by topic, from music history to life sciences. 
The Library of Congress’ “For Teachers” page highlights ready-to-use classroom materials that are aligned with state standards and take advantage of the Library’s primary sources. It includes access to primary source sets around topics such as U.S. presidents; short facts or activities for class starters, such as “Today in History” and everyday science mysteries; themed lesson plans for dozens of topics; and even professional development curriculum.
The NASA for Educators page includes featured articles with information about NASA’s various missions; image galleries on a wide variety of topics; information about NASA careers, internships, fellowships, and scholarships; NASA-produced multimedia materials; and more. An Education Materials Finder will help teachers locate NASA resources that can be used in the classroom; users can search by keywords, grade level, product type, and subject. With hundreds of publications and websites indexed, the finder is the best way to locate NASA educational resources, the agency says.
The National Science Digital Library is the nation’s online library for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It provides free math lessons and activities aligned with the Math Common Core Standards, as well as STEM-related blogs and other free teacher resources and lesson plan ideas. Targeted for K-12 teachers, higher-education professionals, and librarians, NSDL also provides science literary maps and iTunes multimedia files.
Online professional development, TV programming and multimedia web content, lesson plan ideas, and ways to connect with other educators are all things featured on the PBS Teachers page. The website also features news and and webinars for teachers to view.
Teachers’ Domain offers free digital media from public TV broadcasters for educational use. Users can search for materials via individual state standards, Common Core State Standards, or national standards from different organizations. Website users can create online profiles in order to share the resources they have learned for a particular lesson with others.
For over a decade, TeAchnology has been providing free and easy-to-use resources for teachers, including “Teacher Timesavers” to help educators better organize. The site also features 42,000-plus lesson plans, 9,000 free printable worksheets, rubrics, teaching tips, web quests, and other free teacher resources.
Thinkfinity is a free digital learning platform from the Verizon Foundation that offers comprehensive teaching and learning resources created by content partners such as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the International Reading Association, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the National Geographic Society, and more. Its content includes interactive student games, lesson plans focused on various themes, education blogs and online discussions, and much more.
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