Resources for Afghans Teaching Girls at Home

This page is focused on easy-to-use, legal-to-share resources for people in Afghanistan to use who are teaching girls at home, girls who are being kept from proper schools by the Taliban and other violent extremists. This compilation of resources is especially for people, mostly women, who have no training in teaching.

Resources in Dari and Pashto would be terrific - would love for such to be suggested or compiled by others on a page I could link to.

Resources need to be:

• Legal to use (copyright free or with a copyright that allows anyone to use them).
• Easy to navigate and use.
• Not rely on excellent Internet access to be used.
• Be written in plain English that is easy to understand by people with limited English skills.
• Not require that each student have her own Internet-connected device.

Materials that can be downloaded and used offline are the BEST - it can be very hard in Afghanistan to watch videos, listen to podcasts, etc.

Remember that women in Afghanistan, under the Taliban:

• Must be quiet.
• May not be heard singing.
• May not be heard reciting or reading aloud anything that is not the Koran.
• May have a very limited indoor space for physical activity.
• Could be put into danger if they upload images of themselves to their phones or the Internet.

These resources help a limited number of women and girls, as most do not have Internet access in Afghanistan and literacy rates are quite low.

I would welcome someone else hosting this information if they can update it more often, rate the resources in greater detail, etc. Especially if that person is a certified teacher. 

Learning resources:

Khan Academy. A nonprofit with the mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Open Culture. Free K-12 Education resources. 1,700 Free Online Courses. 200 Free Textbooks. 300 Free Language Lessons. 200 Online Certificate Programs. 100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs. 150 Free Business Courses 1,150 Free Movies. 1,000 Free Audio Books. Free Podcasts. 800 Free eBooks.

GALILEO Open Learning Materials/. GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.

Libre Texts. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to freeing the textbook from the limitations and costs of traditional textbooks. 

Opentextbooks. The Open Textbook Library was started so that faculty could find open textbooks in one place. "We define an open textbook as one that has an open license that makes it free for anyone to use and change. It can be print or digital."

Project Gutenberg. Free books that have expired copyrights.

Open Library. A project of the Internet Archive.

Duolingo - game-like site to learn languages.

BiteSize from BBC, a free series of lessons for students, starting at age 3. Math, languages and more.


Periwinkle channel, a YouTube channel that consists of e-learning videos for Kindergarten to Class 5 on Songs, Rhymes, Stories, English, Grammar, Math, Science, Social Studies, Hindi, Environmental Science, General Knowledge, Information Technology, Origami and much more.


Crash Course - a series of YouTube videos of more than 32 courses on a wide variety of subjects, including English literature, world history, biology, philosophy, theater, ecology, organic chemistry,  and many more

Security:

Install a virtual private network (VPN), and before you log in to the Internet, change your VPN so that it shows you are from another country, like Delhi, India or Houston, Texas. There are free versions of VPNs where you have to watch ads ever so often in order to use them. DewVPN is another option. Do not have a shortcut to this app on your phone or laptop.

Install TOR. Do not have a shortcut to this app on your phone or laptop. Tor Browser isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you. Any cookies automatically clear when you're done browsing. So will your browsing history. TOR allows you to browse privately, to better protect yourself against tracking and surveillance, and to circumvent Internet censorship.

Download and use Intra, a security app used to stop government regimes from censoring the internet and manipulating traffic. Intra automatically points your device to Google’s public DNS server, but you’re able to point it to change it to other servers like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 through the settings. Do not have a shortcut to this app on your phone or laptop.

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