Help keep your students more engaged
Free PDF teaching materials are always in great demand. They were popular downloads even before our classrooms started changing. Look at the world right now and you won’t find it difficult to see why remote teaching just might have jumped from the future to the present.
Parents need to create lessons at home. Students must learn a lot on their own too. And teachers are facing new challenges to keep their young wards engaged.
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That’s why as a teacher or a parent, you might find these online sources for free PDF teaching materials worth a few bookmarks.
MERLOT
The acronym MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. It is a shared knowledgebase of learning materials for both teachers and students. An international consortium of institutions are partners on the system. It also hosts one of the largest collections of Open textbooks through the Open Textbook Project.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: The powerful search features on the platform should help you get to the right teaching material, whether it be free worksheets for teachers or free lesson plans. You can do a basic search by keyword, ISBN, URL, or author. Use the Advanced Material Search filters if you are looking for a specific format like PDF.
But its most powerful tool is the Smart Search which can find open educational resources beyond MERLOT’s own index.
Scholastic
Scholastic is a well-known publishing company for children’s books and educational media. They have a footprint in more than 165 countries worldwide. You can shop for teaching materials at The Scholastic Teacher Store and The Parent Store. But try out some of their free teaching materials first.
You will find lesson plans, discussion guides, vocabulary lists, and student activity sheets on the site. A lot of them are printables you can download and use.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: You can use the search bar on the site or go to the Teachers Home. The free teaching resources are arranged by grade from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8.
Crayola
Crayola focuses on boosting learning with the help of art. It is an art supplies company after all. That said, you will find hundreds of lesson plans, crafts, and activities for all grade levels. Then, you can print all lesson plans as PDFs.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: There are 1,700+ lesson plans. Search for them by category, sub-category, and grade from the Lesson Plans page.
OER Commons
OER Commons hosts common core resources in the public domain. It’s like a public digital library where both teachers and students can find study materials organized around topics. It is free to access and teachers can share the study materials without any restrictions.
OER Commons has features like Groups and Hubs which are mini-communities around specific areas of interest. These are common areas to ask for help if you are looking for more teaching tools.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: Use the Advanced Search Page. Filters like Instructor Materials and Media Format will help you find what you need.
OpenStax
This online educational resource was started at Rice University as a place to share and adapt courses, books, and reports. The aim of this nonprofit charitable initiative is to break down the traditional barriers to higher education by giving students and teachers access to high-quality college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low-cost in print.
OpenStax covers science, arts, and business subjects. Right now, the library has 38 books you can read online or download as PDF. You can also order a low-priced print copy.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: Use the Instructor resources tab on each course page to access teaching materials. Only teachers can log in and use teaching aids like lecture slides and answer sheets.
Adolescent Literacy
AdLit is a national multimedia project that provides assistance to parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers. Teaching materials cover Grade 4 to 12. Resources follow the Common Core standards and aim to improve English literacy in adolescents.
It is an educational program of WETA, a public broadcasting station that serves the Greater Washington Area. The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ann B. and Thomas L. Friedman Family Foundation fund the initiative.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: The site has lots of video, webcasts, and text content on reading and writing best practices. Each topic is well covered with PDF instructional materials and classroom aids. Look for the download links on the topic pages.
OpenLearn
OpenLearn is a part of Open University which attracts 75 million learners from around the world.
The massive open online courses cover a wide range of subjects. There are 1000+ free courses on eight subject areas. Learn anything from Greek history to modern-day politics, and anything else you want.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: Many courses are available as eBook downloads in PDF. You will find more content labelled as Link to course PDF on the course page.
A few printed posters and booklets made for their TV & radio programs co-produced with the BBC are also available.
Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ is a massive database of 12000 open access journals that covers science, technology, medicine, social science, and humanities.
The community is behind this collection. You can search the database for quality, peer reviewed open access research material to support your academic needs.
The not-for-profit organization is based in the U.K.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: Search by subject or use the search bar on top. DOAJ has full text formats of the research papers available in PDF, HTML, and DOC.
Open Yale Courses
Yale University makes selected lectures and other materials from some of its courses available to the public free of charge.
Subjects covered include liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. Each course includes a full set of class lectures recorded in high-quality video and supported by other course materials. For instance, problem sets.
You can download the videos for the classes along with Searchable transcripts of every lecture.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: You can download the course material for every class as a ZIP folder that packs all the assets including PDF materials.
MIT Open Courseware Online Textbooks
If you are a higher education instructor in specialized engineering, then this library of free online textbooks can be invaluable. It is one of the few sources for free books on aeronautics, civil engineering, and material science.
Some of the books are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books.
Also, head to the OCW Educator Portal for more teaching resources. You are free to follow and borrow from the best practices of MIT instructors.
Search for PDF Teaching Materials: Use the search tool on the OCW Educator Portal to select your subject area. Every class has documentation for topics covered.
Teaching And Learning Is Easier Now
Digital devices are tremendously distracting. But they are also great enablers. PDF teaching materials are old fashioned, but the cross-platform compatibility of the format ensures everyone can download them on any device.
Teachers don’t have to depend on the whiteboard anymore. And students can carry their education home thanks to resources like these and the universe of elearning apps that make learning fun and immersive.
Which are the other invaluable sites for PDF teaching materials would you add to the list?
