More and more high schools are embracing online courses to reach more students and all times of the day. While you can spend a lot of money for online course software, you don't have to. Here are seven free platforms for teaching online courses.

Over the last eighteen months I've created and offered seven free ebooks for teachers. In those ebooks I've covered Google tools, web search, video creation, blogging, and other resources of interest to educators. All seven of those ebooks are available in the right hand column of Free Technology for Teachers. This morning I'd like to highlight some other free ebooks created by others for teachers and parents.

Every year schools around the world spend thousands of dollars on textbooks that are often outdated by the end of their first year in the classroom. Ebooks, many of them free, can represent huge savings for schools over purchasing textbooks. Here are seven places that you can find free ebooks.

Forty years that brought incredible change in our country, forged in the crucible of the civil rights movement and the battle to end segregation. Forty years that changed me as well. I was born in Mississippi in 1954, the oldest child of Abon and Lucille Bridges. That year the United States handed down its landmark decision ordering the integration of public schools. Not that I knew anything about school at the time. What I knew and loved was growing up on the farm my paternal grandparents sharecropped. It was a very hard life, though. My parents heard there were better opportunities in the city. We moved to New Orleans, where my father found work as a service station attendant, and my mother took night jobs to help support our growing family.

Girls who stay in school for seven or more years typically marry four years later and have two fewer children than girls who drop out. Fewer dependents per worker allows for greater economic growth. And the World Food Programme has found that when girls and women earn income, they reinvest 90% of it in their families. They buy books, medicine, bed nets. For men, that figure is more like 30% to 40%. "Investment in girls' education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world," Larry Summers wrote when he was chief economist at the World Bank. Of such cycles are real revolutions born.

As people increasingly embrace social media and new technologies with open arms, social learning, informal learning and blended learning continue to gain a strong foothold in an organization's learning palette. We have scouted the Internet to help you know how. And, how could we possibly end this post without mentioning the iPad? Besides the latest scoop, news and stories, you can also find tips, tricks and tutorials to help you get the most out of this 9.7" wonder. Find it all here in our Weekly Digest - a collection of our top 20 links from the week gone by, each accompanied by a quick brief.

Recently, I wrote about my goal of learning everything. This is more than a tad ambitious, and probably impossible. Even learning a small fraction of everything can have huge benefits that ripple outwards towards every other area of life. Unfortunately, most people fall into a group I'll call "functional" learners, and severely cut off their potential.

Over 2,000 tools for learning/working in education and the workplace, conveniently compiled in the 2011 Learning Tools Directory. If you want to recommend any tool/s, just add them in the Comments of the relevant page/s and they'll be added in by the site admin.

In high school, I rarely studied. Despite that, I graduated second in my class. In university, I generally studied less than an hour or two before major exams. However, over four years, my GPA always sat between an A and an A+. Recently I had to write a law exam worth 100% of my final grade. Unfortunately, I was out of the country and didn't get back by plane until late Sunday night. I had to write the test at 9 am Monday morning. I got an A after just one hour of review on the plane. The fact is most of my feats are relatively mundane. I've had a chance to meet polyglots who speak 8 languages, people who have mastered triple course loads and students who went from C or B averages to straight A+ grades while studying less than before.

According to the site's "Who We Are" section, they'll accept anonymously submitted "restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a university." That means they want those private emails between professors, copies of shady contracts, secret research, and internal memos. Whistle-blowers can upload their documents through an encryption-free electronic drop box. The site's journalists then turn them into news stories.

Keeping education honest

Learn about severe weather that could hit a US area and how to prepare for it.