THIS week I attended the annual Nadeosa (National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa) conference in Johannesburg and as always the conference did not dissapoint.

The conference is one of the few where they charge very little, do not give you loads of gifts in your conference bag but deliver on quality of content.

I have found the past few years that the higher the conference is priced, the more gifts you will get to make up for the lack of good quality content.

Each session that I attended at this conference taught me something new and of value.

I wonder how many of the educators in the Free State realise how many resources are available to them for free?

I have often heard it said that teachers are struggling to get resources to use in class.

This is true for both school teachers and higher education lecturers.

There are a vast number of open educational resources out there. Locally produced and also from the international community.

Locally for school teachers I would recommend the Department of Education website which you will find at www.education.org.za. On the right hand side of the website you will find a link to Workbooks. Here you will find many workbooks which you can download and use in your teaching.

Other open education resources that are available can be found at the following websites:

OER Africa at www.oerafrica.org, MIT open courseware at http://ocw.mit.edu and also if you want great innovative talks you should also visit TED at www.ted.com.

Don’t forget that you can also get access to great video resources directly from www.youtube.com.

There are loads of open resources available for you to use in your daily educational endeavours. The main thing to remember is that you are allowed to use these resources free of charge. You can now have the best content available to you to use in your teaching.