Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


Federal Site for Free Education Resources Grows and Gets Mobile Facelift

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 06/25/13

A site for accessing freely available education materials from public agencies has just been revamped for the third time in its lengthy history to include a cleaner interface and many more listings. The Federal Registry for Educational Excellence (FREE) helps educators, students, and others find digital teaching and learning resources maintained by the federal government. The latest version, released in beta form, also includes listings of free materials from private organizations.

The catalog uses the Learning Registry, an open repository of data about digital learning objects on the Internet developed by the United States Department of Education. Using the platform, the new edition of FREE has collected 200,000 resources from federal agencies and public and private organizations. Currently, it includes 2028 items for the arts and music, 896 for language arts, 4,298 for math, 62,262 for science, 11,587 for U.S. history, and others.

Users can browse by subject or by standard. The standards included at launch covered Common Core math as well as geography and science.

The new site also incorporates coding changes that make it accessible by mobile devices.

The former version of the site is still available during the beta period at free1.ed.gov/index.cfm.

FREE was introduced in 1998 under the direction of former President Bill Clinton. The last redesign was done in 2006. The 66 contributing agencies include the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of State, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

In a blog entry about the beta launch, Department of Ed Web Director Jill James wrote that future enhancements may include the ability to allow users "to rate, tag, and comment on specific resources," save favorites for future reference, and allow them to share content on social media sites.

ED is seeking feedback on the site at its e-mail address, [email protected], and on Twitter @FreeResources.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Intros Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.

  • Abstract Network of Blue and Orange Lines

    Tech Industry Leaders Launch Alliance for AI Agent Security

    NVIDIA and 36 other industry partners are targeting agent security across multi-vendor clouds by combining open technologies for workload identity, agent controls, vulnerability scanning, and software supply-chain security.

  • digital brain integrating legal regulation and security interface

    Survey: Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

    A new report from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.

  • Abstract background with digital shield made of data particles glowing blue blocking against cyber attacks

    AI Attacks Push Organizations Toward Autonomous Cybersecurity Defense

    Artificial intelligence is raising the stakes of cyber conflict as attackers use the technology to accelerate reconnaissance, uncover vulnerabilities, and launch attacks faster than many security teams can respond, according to a new report from agentic AI security company Kai.