Humanities Resources (English, Reading, Art, Social Studies, Theatre, Music, Foreign Language)

Although I am not a humanities teacher by trade, I do keep an eye on this kind of stuff as it is useful to my teaching partner and others. So I will maintain this list as I do the Math and Science Resources post.

For ease of compilation, I have considered humanities to involve English, Social Studies, Economics, Theatre, Music, Art, and Foreign Language.

Art:
Inkscape - A free an open source alternative to Adobe Inkscape
GIMP - A free and open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop

Communication: With either of these tools, you can set up conversations with students, teachers, speakers, authors, etc from around the world for free. All you need is a webcam.

Foreign Language Tools:
Google Translate - Easily translate documents, websites, or simply text to numerous foreign languages. Keep in mind it is not perfect but often is enough to give or get the idea.
Busuu - They say that the best way to learn a new language is immersion. However, it is rarely feasible to create such an environment. Yet with Busuu, you and your students can study with people around the world in order to learn. Best part is, it is free!
http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons - Just what it says, free language lessons.


Geography:
Google Lit Trips - Take a trip through literature with your students using Google Earth.

News:
NPR - While so many newspapers/media outlets are online, National Public Radio provides all of its content online. While no source is unbiased, NPR audits itself to make sure that it is at least balanced.
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp - An interesting website that allows you to see the front page from websites around the world. This could be very useful to compare a major event from different vantage points.
Worldmapper: Shows world maps with countries distorted to demonstrate various inequities (e.g. Income of less than $1/day, Population, Internet Penetration,etc.) 

Primary Resources:
World Digital Library - A collection of primary resources from around the world are collected and made public on this site.

Public Domain Resources (texts, audio, pictures, etc): One of my favorite sayings can be found on a bumper sticker, "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the air force needs to have a bake sale to purchase a bomber.

Until that day, we must use every resource at our disposal to bring the best to our students while working within our means. Thank goodness for the Internet. The following links provide resources to media whos authors have either made their works public domain willingly or let their copyright expire. You can contribute to these sites if you wish.

Authorama - Books
Archive - Various Media
Creative Commons - Various Media
Justfreebooks - Books
Librivox - Audiobooks
Lit2go - Books
Many Books - Books
Musopen  - Music/Sheet Music
Open Library - Books

Pdinfo - Music/Sheet Music
http://philosophy.eserver.org/ - Philosophy Texts

After the above statement and after reading this blog, you might get the impression that I stronly support openness of information, and you would be right. While I believe everyone is due what they have earned, I also believe that copyright law is too strict and does not benefit the artists or writers.

Especially with so many of our students downloading music, software, movies, etc that by current law is illegal. It is necessary for them to understand the law as it so directly affects them. Here are some resources to help you: 
Electronics Frontier Foundation - An organization which advocates openness of information and pushes back against unfair or unnecessarily strict copyright law.
Teaching Copyright - Curriculum designed to teach about copyright, open source, and other various laws surrounding this topic. You might wonder why it is necessary to do so, but current textbooks paint an unfair and negative image of open practices. As I said, this issue impacts your students as much as any other in their life.

Recording Music and Sound
Audacity - Record voice and music on multiple tracks with tons of features and effects. Free and Open Source
Tux Guitar - A free and open source tablature and score editor.
UStream - Similar to YouTube but better if you are doing a recurring show. Allows easy uploading and broadcast.

Research
Wikipedia - Scorned by teachers for far too long, Wikipedia has evolved to the point where it is actually more accurate than many encyclopedias. If you do not believe me, attempt to submit something false to it and you will see how difficult the process is.
Zotero - If Internet bookmarks are not enough to capture your research and citations, you should check out this. It promises to keep track of clippings, quotes, books, research all over the Internet in a way that is much more conducive to term papers, dissertations, etc.
NGrams - Find the history and frequency of a word.
Google Earth - Beyond the coolness factor, Google Earth allows you to take you students all over the world, literally. There are resources for Geography, Geology, Geocaching
Internet Public Library - A helpful search for resources of all ages.
World Cat - A library search engine for the whole world. I once had a book delivered to my library from England by using this!
Snopes - Exhaustive resarch into myths, urban legends, and memes. Snopes for Critical Thinking
Timelines of History - Self Explanatory.

Self-Publishing
Blurb - Used by many in our district to create books of student work/research.
Ka-blam - Print up comics, and more! This is the site that the Graphic Novel Project uses.
Lulu - Similar to Blurb, check between the two for specials and pricing.
CK12 - Create and share your textbook around the world. There are currently no humanities resources. Be the first!

Writing
Celtx - Professional yet free software for writing screenplays, comics, and scripts.
Distributed Proofreaders - A site where you could sign up to proofread uploaded texts to public domain sites. Could be useful for students to refine their grammatical skills.

World Data
World Clock - Provides data on a variety of topics like population, crime, food, etc.
Breathing Earth - CO2 emissions by country.


If you have a suggestion, put it in the comments and I will add it to the official list or if you would like more detail on one I will create a specific post/series devoted to it.