On YouTube, the path to education is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge. Left to their own devices, kids have a tendency to veer away from the math tutorials and head straight for the water-skiing squirrels. What’s an educator to do?
Google believes it has the answer with “YouTube for Schools,” a new service that gives teachers and administrators the ability to filter out everything but their own selections from YouTube EDU, a curated collection of educational videos from sources ranging from Sesame Street to Harvard.
“We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classroom, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students,” writes YouTube Product Manager Brian Truong. “While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”
To help teachers find the best material with ease, YouTube has organized the educational videos by subject and grade level, with more than 300 playlists to choose from at youtube.com/teachers. To learn more, or to sign up, go to youtube.com/schools.
Also don’t miss our own curated list of Intelligent YouTube Channels, which highlights the best video collections on the Google-owned service.
Every year, thousands of American high school students read a common selection of great novels — classics loved by young and old readers alike. Today, we have selected 20 of the most popular books and highlighted ways that you can download versions for free, mostly as free audio books and ebooks, and sometimes as movies and radio dramas. You will find more great works — and sometimes other digital formats — in our twin collections: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices and 550 Free Audio Books. So please give them a good look over, and if we’re missing a novel you want, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want.
1984 by George Orwell: Read Online
Although published in 1949, 1984 still captures our imagination generations later because it offers one of the best literary accounts of totalitarianism ever published. And it’s simply a great read.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: eText — Free Radio Dramatization (by Huxley himself)
Little known fact. Huxley once taught George Orwell French at Eton. And, years later his 1931 classic, Brave New World, is often mentioned in the same breath with 1984 when it comes to great books that describe a dystopian future.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - Free ebook — Free Audio Book (MP3) — Radio Drama version (1938) — Movie
Mary Shelley started writing the great monster novel when she was only 18 and completed it when she was 21. The 1823 gothic novel is arguably one of your first works of science fiction.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Radio Dramatization by Orson Welles (MP3)
More than 100 years after its publication (1902), Conrad’s novella still offers the most canonical look at colonialism and imperialism. So powerful was its influence that Orson Welles dramatized it in 1938, and the book also famously inspired Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979.
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen – Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
Jane Austen’s 1813 novel remains as popular as ever. To date, it has sold more than 20 million copies, and, every so often, it finds itself adapted to a new film, TV or theater production. A must read.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
When you think Huckleberry Finn, you think Great American Novel. It was controversial when it was first published in 1884, and it remains so today. But nonetheless Twain’s classic is a perennial favorite for readers around the world.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) The Call of the Wild, first published in 1903, is regarded as Jack London’s masterpiece. It’s “a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike.”
The Crucible by Arthur Miller - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Arthur Miller’s 1952 play used the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 to offer a commentary on McCarthyism that tarnished America during the 1950s. Today, The Crucible occupies a central place in America’s literary canon.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
This 1939 novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and later helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. It’s perhaps the most important book to give literary expression to the Great Depression.
The Odyssey by Homer – Free eBook — Free Audio Book
The Western literary tradition begins with Homer’s epic poems The Iliad (etext here) and The Odyssey, both written some 2800 years ago. It has been said that “if the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life.” And that just about gets to the heart of the poem.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
It was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction (1951) and certainly one of his most popular, bringing many readers into contact with Hemingway’s writing for the first time.
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Free Movie
This Civil War novel won what Joseph Conrad called “an orgy of praise” after its publication in 1895, and inspired Ernest Hemingway and the Modernists later. The novel made Stephen Crane a celebrity at the age of 24, though he died only five years later.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Free eBooks – Free Audio Book — Movie
Though set in Puritan Boston between 1642 and 1649, Hawthorne’s magnum opus explores “the moral dilemmas of personal responsibility, and the consuming emotions of guilt, anger, loyalty and revenge” that were relevant in 1850 (when the book was published). And they remain so today.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Harper Lee’s 1960 novel takes an incisive look at attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South during the 1930s. It won the Pulitzer Prize a year later.
Note: We listed Audible.com as an option when books were still under copyright.
Meanwhile, educators don’t miss our collection of Free Courses. It features many free Literature courses, including courses on American literature.
We told you about the book earlier this year, and now it’s just about here. Set for release on October 4th, The Magic of Realitywill be unlike any book written by Richard Dawkins before. It is illustrated for starters, and largely geared toward young and old readers alike. Perfect, he says, for anyone 12 and up. When it comes to the structure and gist of the book, Dawkins does a pretty good job of explaining things. So let’s let the video roll…
Note: If you’re willing to tweet about the book, you can view the first 24 pages of The Magic of Reality here.
Back in 1964, Shel Silverstein wrote The Giving Tree, a widely loved children’s book now translated into more than 30 languages. It’s a story about the human condition, about giving and receiving, using and getting used, neediness and greediness, although many finer points of the story are open to interpretation. Today, we’re rewinding the videotape to 1973, when Silverstein’s little book was turned into a 10 minute animated film (now added to our free movie collection). Silverstein narrates the story himself and also plays the harmonica.… which brings us to his musical talents. Don’t miss Silverstein, also a well known songwriter, appearing on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970, and the two singing “A Boy Named Sue.” Silverstein wrote the song, and Cash made it famous. Thanks to Mark, co-editor of the philosophy blog/podcast The Partially Examined Life for sending these along.
Some months ago, we asked you to name your favorite TED Talk. And, more than a few of you flagged Sir Ken Robinson’s presentation from 2006, Do Schools Kill Creativity? You’re in good company. The talk remains one of TED’s most popular videos of all time. Today, TED has released Robinson’s sequel (of sorts). Recorded this past February, Bring on the Learning Revolution! “makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.” Give it some time. Perhaps it’s another talk for the ages.
This year, Tim Burton’s production of Alice In Wonderland was welcomed by a flurry of media buzz and a rather polarized public response debating whether the iconic director had butchered or reinvented the even more iconic children’s classic. But discussion of the film’s creative merits aside, one thing it did do brilliantly was rekindle the public’s interest in what’s easily the most beloved work of children’s literature of the past two centuries.
So beloved, in fact, that Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel has generated hundreds of reprints, film adaptations and various derivative works over the years. Many of these works are now available in the public domain — even a simple search in the Internet Archive sends you down a rabbit hole of adaptations and remakes, spanning from landmark early cinema treasures to offbeat products of contemporary digital culture.
Today, we’ve curated a selection of the most interesting and culturally significant — the “curiouser and curiouser,” if you will — free versions of, tributes to, and derivatives of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.
The fundamentals: A Project Gutenberg free digital copy of Carroll’s original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland text
A 1916 abridged version intended for younger children, digitized by the Library of Congress, is available from the International Children’s Digital Library and features some wonderful illustration — though, regrettably, it lacks the Cheshire Cat
For a classic with a spin, try this audio version read by blogger extraordinaire, BoingBoing co-editor, Popular Science columnist and vocal free content advocate Cory Doctorow
The earliest cinematic adaptation of the book, directed by Cecil Hepworth in 1903, is a silent film gem, clocking in at just 8 minutes and 19 seconds. Watch above.
In 1915, W. W. Young directed the second American adaptation of Alice — a massive six-reel production that showcased the rapid evolution of filmmaking in just a decade since the first production. Though much of the film is now lost, 42 minutes of it can be seen at the Internet Archive for free
A 1966 British adaptation by director Jonathan Miller for the BBC features an ambitious cast — including Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Sir John Gielguld as Mock Turtle, Michael Redgrave as The Caterpillar and Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter — and its soundtrack, scored by the legendary Ravi Shankar, exudes the borderline folk-psychedelia sound of the Woodstock era. The film, divided into seven parts, is available for free on YouTube.
This 2‑minute version of Alice In Wonderland shot in the virtual world Second Life is an eerie testament to just how widely Carroll’s classic resonates.
Perhaps the biggest treasure of all, Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript, available from the British Library — 91 pages of precious literary history, with original illustrations from artist John Tenniel. The online gallery also features a preface telling the fascinating story of the Oxford mathematician’s real-life inspiration for the book and the fate of the real Alice
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of eclectic interestingness and indiscriminate curiosity. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and Huffington Post, and spends a disturbing amount of time curating interestingness on Twitter.
This comes to us via a tip from Twitter. The Khan Academy has now posted on YouTube over 800 videos (find a complete list here) that will teach students the ins-and-outs of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finance, physics, economics and more. The clips have been recorded by Salman Khan, a Harvard Business School and MIT grad. And to give you a feel for them, we’ve posted above the first in a long sequence of lectures on differential equations. (The remaining lectures can be found here.) This YouTube channel, which now appears on our list, Intelligent YouTube Video Collections, is one of several video sites that provide free online tutoring via video. As mentioned in the past, you can find online good video collections dedicated to chemistry and calculus.
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