Using ICT in Further Education

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a combined effort to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular open textbooks in community college courses. An open textbook is defined as:

a body of educational content that is openly available over the web, by mail, or in a book store with a copyright that allows copying and distribution or, with the most open copyrights, allows modification of the content and even sale.

CCCOER Open Textbooks provides a growing list of links, covering a wide range of subject areas, to “OPEN and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses“. In some cases, the links also lead to useful podcasts and videos.

This is a great resource. On my first quick look, I found a comprehensive guide to using OpenOffice 3.o!

MegaZine 3 is a powerful pageflip engine, which allows you to create striking interactive pageflip books. Include text, images, videos and background sounds.

You can also add a ‘zoom’ function to your image by including a link to a high resolution version of the same image.

A certain knowledge about HTML and/or XML is needed in order to use MegaZine 3 but if you have the basics then setting up a book is extremely simple as an intuitive XML structure is used to control the content of a book. But, even if you do not know any HTML there are a couple of tutorials provided in the forum, which will help you to get started.

Creating books with MegaZine 3 could prove to be a nice incentive for those students needing to learn HTML.

Check out the demo book to see all the features in action!!

Girlebooks provides a collection of ebooks, written by women, with the intention of making “classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium“.

The texts are gathered from Manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg and then “professionally formatted“ providing a table of contents and text reflow for small reading devices. In fact, Girlebooks offers the ebooks in several different formats accommodating most ebook readers.

Girlebooks also includes contemporary female authors, who submit their work for inclusion.

Thanks Pilar for finding this one!

Sign up now for your free 1 year online subscription to PC Magazine from the Read Green Initiative.

“PC Magazine is America’s #1 technology magazine, delivering authoritative, lab-based comparative reviews of technology products and services to more than 6.6 million professionals every issue“.

Just enter your email address and register for an account with Zinio and that’s it. Your shiny new December issue of PC Magazine will be waiting for you in your Library section. You can read the publication online, in your browser, or download the Zinio reader and enjoy it offline.

If PC Magazine is not your ‘cup of tea’ then browse through the available subscriptions at the Read Green Initiative and pick the one that suits you best. You are allowed one free subscription per email account!

Thanks for this one Amit.

Project Gutenberg is the largest online repository of free eBooks, presently containing over 20,000 titles.

In fact, the stated mission of Project Gutenberg is “to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks“.

You can search the catalog using author, title word/s or etext number. It is also possible to simply browse through the titles or choose one from the latest top 100 downloads. 

The downloaded eBooks are limited to text, html or audio format and this is where NetBook comes in.

NetBook is an eBook reader/listener for Project Gutenberg, which lets you easily search the database, download and read/listen to the eBooks and store them in cache for offline use.

NetBook also automatically downloads the “new books” and adds them to the catalog list.