Free Educational Resources

Here's another excellent online resource for free educational stuff - Open Learn from Open University - http://bit.ly/2iVFn7S

I am amazed by the comprehensivity of the this free channel. Some of the unique features are listed below:

• Range of free tools - videos, articles, games and features
• Range of subjects covered - Arts, Forensics, Project Management, Science, Economics and many more
• Offers about 800 free courses
• Offers digital badges

A channel worth subscribing to !

Free Online tool about English !

An excellent online site about English, http://bit.ly/2jRvCbW

The site traces the history of english and presents many interesting perspectives on the language. The site/ youtube channel is a part of the Open Learn from Open University.

I watched "The History of English in Ten Minutes" and it was indeed an interesting one.

Nothing much to elaborate on. The best approach would be to visit the site/ channel and get going

Skippy - A wonderful app/ tool for (reading through) Videos

SKIPPY, www.skippy.ai is an excellent tool o manage the video watching in terms of watching the relevant portions (as per our need and interest). It's an interesting app (at least i found it so!) and could be very useful if used with purpose. Some of the useful features of the app are

• control over the video playback. A viewer can skip over the portions of the video through the SKIP button.
• Display of the transcript which helps the viewer arrive at the core of the video if he/ she wishes to skip the other portions of the video
• Availability of relevant videos segregated in categories. Right now, there are 4 categories available - Inspiration, Social Studies, Art & Culture and Tech & Science.
• Features like Bookmark to help save for future reference

This app is not a substitute for any video playing tool such as youtube, ect. It's like a complimentary tool to help the viewer by providing them better control over their video viewing  and does save lot of time.

I tried the android version of the app and i am pretty impressed with the nice and easy interface of the app !

Kiddle - A Visual Search Engine for Kids

Kiddle, www.kiddle.co is a nice visual search engine for kids powered by Google. The "co" in the domain stands for "children only" and this itself explains the purpose and objective of the search engine. Kiddle caters to the requirements of K-12. It is a very safe search engine and offers search across five categories - Web, Images, News, Videos and Encyclopedia. To ensure that only kids

specific results are displayed, content on Kiddle is handpicked and checked by Kiddle editors. This ensures blocking of any explicit during the Kiddle search. The users can also suggest more keyword or/ and site blocking which is deemed unfit for kids. To make the search engine more appealing to kids, the search results are displayed in larger fonts and illustrated with big thumbnails.

It's indeed a welcome news for parents and educators as they can rely on this safe tool when the kids browse the internet. The only downside is the "Encyclopedia" which provides the same look and feel as Wikipedia and could surely have been made more visually appealing.

Overall, a wonderful tool to ensure safe browsing for kids.  

JPEG Image Optimization free online tool

All of us feel the need to upload or transfer JPEG files online but at times because of large size the file transfer becomes an issue. Here's a wonderful free online tool which work wonders. The tool is JPEG-OPTIMIZER, http://jpeg-optimizer.com/   I tried various tools but this tool stands apart 

because it addresses the basic fundamental requirement of size reduction and that too without any loss of quality whatsoever.  The size of my original image was close to 3 MB and i wanted to upload the file with a size less than 100 kb. After trying various other tools which could not meet my requirement, i tried this one and this worked wonder. I was pleasantly surprised to see the size of my file optimized through this tool. The tool did a whopping 98.7%   reduction. 

The interface is simple and easy. A great tool for jpeg optimization !

Free NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY by MHRD, Government of India

National Digital Library, https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/  is the most comprehensive resource to access free educational material. Be it any subject, any standard, any level or any format (book, video, audio, etc.), the NDL site provides all the answers. The project is a very prestigious project of Government of India and is supported by MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development) and IIT (India Institute of Technology), Kharagpur

Don't look any further and start accessing the free repository of content - text books, reference books, subject videos, lecture videos/ audios. The beauty of this project is that it goes beyond the typical academic content and offers content much broader in range, going upto the research areas.

Just go ahead and start downloading ! 

EXPLANIA, an online ANIMATIONS site...wow, what a site !!

EXPLANIA, http://www.explania.com/en is indeed a wonderful site full of animations, tutorials and instructional videos. It boasts of a very simple to use interface and is a treat to watch.

I viewed a few animations and it was quite useful, in  simple language and with lots of clarity. One can also make use of the side bar towards the bottom left to view videos from different relevant categories.

Few other highly useful features include

• In case you have a website, blog, wiki, etc. you can embed the animations as well.
• Description provided for the animation
• Comments feature to provide feedback on the animations, videos
• Multi Channels available 
• Facility to Download the video(s)/ animation(s) 

Indeed a highly useful and wonderful site !!!