Free Digital Resources

Beverly Riddell, Director of Instructional Technology

November 2016

I recently attended a Teaching and Learning with Technology conference sponsored by James Madison University. One of the sessions was on Free Digital Resources, and I thought some of these resources might be interesting ways for your students to present their research or assignments.

Here are some of the resources JMU faculty are using, and some locally produced examples for your amusement ….

Timeline JS: https://timeline.knightlab.com/ – build a timeline ’story’ from Google Spreadsheet, include images, and embed in a website. In this example it took much longer to find the images and text than it did to create and publish the timeline.
(Click Image below to see Interactive Timeline Example – History of Mary Baldwin University)

Storymap JS: https://storymap.knightlab.com/ – build Geographical map ‘story’ using Google resources. Again,it took longer to find the information than it did to display it on a StoryMap.
(Click Image below to link to Interactive Story Map Example -Mary Baldwin’s International Connections)

Data Visualization Tool: https://www.silk.co/ – pull simple spreadsheet data into website. I created this example from the COL by Building spreadsheet.
(Click Image below to link to see examples from silk.co –  Fall 2016 Courses by Building and by Days of the Week)

Editors note: silk.co seems to be defunct now. Other data visualization tool examples can be found here.

Website Builder: https://www.weebly.com/ – Very easy way to add text, images, links, videos, buttons, slideshows.
(Click Image below to link to see example website I built very quickly using weebly)

Also https://spark.adobe.com/ – very similar to Weebly, with the addition of “glide shows”.
(Click Image below to link to see example website I built very quickly using Adobe Spark)

To embed data from published websites in your project, you can use https://www.graphiq.com/
(Click Image below to link to see example website with embedded data from graphiq)

Information about other Digital Humanities tools can be found on the Grafton Library website, here:

If you’d like a consultation about how to use any of these tools in your courses, please contact the Library (ask@marybaldwin.edu) or OIT (support@marybaldwin.edu) and we will set up a time to work with you.