Open Book Publishers are the leading independent Open Access publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK: a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. Their site currently offers 173 EBooks that cover a broad range of subjects.
The Internet Archive is making the 1.4 million books in its lending library available for free worldwide as digital books via Open Library!
All you need to do is set up an account and you can access up to 10 books online at a time and read them on devices.
Whether you need textbooks, classic literature, genre fiction or just a good read, it’s worth a look.You can also create and share reading lists, browse by genre and share what you’re reading on social media.
University of Michigan Publishers has made their digital and ebook collection free and accessible to all. It specialises in humanities and social sciences but covers many other academic disciplines. Resources focus on subjects including:
This is currently available until 30th June 2020.
Free online access to all of their Press Journals.This includes full access to online journals including
This is currently available until June 2020.
Soundtrap let’s you record instruments, vocals and use loops to make music anywhere.
Soundtrap for Education is a cloud-based platform that enables students to create music or podcasts. With Soundtrap, students can collaborate on projects using an extensive collection of quality loops, effects, and software instruments from anywhere in the world pretty much on any device. It also integrates with Google Classroom for effortless collaboration.
It’s worth noting that Students can’t sign up for this without a teacher already signing up beforehand. There is a free trial available for teachers and after that there is reduced pricing available for education.
For example, start a new song using all the built in professional loops and software instruments on your tablet when on the bus, continue on your Chromebook when arriving at home, invite a couple of friends, who are working on Mac and Windows devices, and conduct a video chat from within the studio coming up with the bass line for the song and finally find a didgeridoo player in the Soundtrap community laying down a unique ending of the song; you are all working in the same project seeing and hearing all the changes. It’s like Google Docs, but for music production!
See how teachers are using Soundtrap across subjects:
Congratulations! You have registered your users on Soundtrap!
BBC iPlayer lets you watch BBC content from your computer, Smart TV or mobile device.
BBC iPlayer isn’t just for catching up on last night’s Eastenders or rewatching Gavin & Stacey for the 17th time, you can also find a lot of educational material in its depths. You can watch the latest episodes of QI to learn more quirky facts about the world or explore the hundreds of episodes of Science and Nature documentaries. There’s also great comedy and entertainment shows for when you have finished your work for the day and need to relax.
David Attenborough alone can take you through Climate Change for your Science lesson research, the different ecosystems around the world for your Geography research or even the early years of making nature documentaries for Media lesson research.
Some more examples of programmes that can aid your research are below:
Criminology – Jack the Ripper
Engineering – The Limit: Trickiest Tunnel
Music – Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Sport – Shane Williams: Rugby, Concussion and Me
Dance – The Royal Ballet: Mayerling
Don’t forget though that some episodes are only available for a limited time and can be removed from iPlayer at any time.
You can look through all the episodes and series available for each subject on the BBC iPlayer website or click one of these categories; History, Documentaries, Science & Nature, Music.
The Glyn Library needs very little introduction but whilst the library itself is a bit hard to miss, there are some people who aren’t aware of the sheer number of resources that the Library website offer and recommend. The dedicated team create some of their own resources, collating different sites and content together for a number of topics. Take a look at their website.
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The Conversation is a non-profit, charity, independent news outfit that sources its content from academic sources and researchers to help you keep up to date with the world away from the noise of the mainstream media. Take a look at theconversation.com.