5 free and open resources for the school closure period

Last updated on 12 February 2025

Almost one year to the day after the first lockdown period, a new measure to close schools was taken in response to the pandemic. Even though high schools have already been working in half-groups, and thus partly remotely for several months, teachers find it difficult to accompany their students remotely.

Here are five free and open source resources that meet some of the essential needs for the next few days. Do not hesitate to offer me by email or in comment other tools to complete the list.

The Quiziniere. Create tests and quizzes for your students

The Quiziniere is a tool developed by the Canopé network that makes it easy to create online tests and quizzes for your students. Simple to use, the platform allows you to create multimedia quizzes using text, but also images, sound, video or mathematical expressions. It also tracks the results of the class group and each student.

Polymny. Produce pedagogical video capsules for the class

Polymny Studio is a free tool to make videos pedagogical for your class. It is aimed at an audience that does not need to be a video expert to quickly produce quality small videos. No installation, Polymny works from a simple browser and will allow you to create a video capsule based on an existing PowerPoint or presentation.

Etherpad. Write to others in real time on a collaborative word processor

Etherpad is a free and open source word processor that allows you to write to several people at the same time on an online sheet of paper. Very useful for many uses in remote school work. You do not need to configure a server and install Etherpad to use it. Simply choose one of the instances available free of charge by free world actors such as the Les Chatons collective.

BigBlueButton. A free and free virtual classroom platform

BigBlueButton is one of the options to set up a virtual class for your students. It respects the GDPR and offers all the necessary options for this perilous exercise of the remotely recreated class. Like last March, these free platforms can be victims of their success. BigBlueButton has already announced that it wants to limit sessions to one hour. In case of difficulties you can turn to Jitsi or My Class at Home proposed by the CNED.

ToffeShare. Share files, even large ones, with your students

ToffeShare is an online platform that allows files of any size to be shared securely with a group of people. In this area of file storage and sharing there are relatively few free and functional alternatives to the giants of the European online file storage. ToffeShare is trying it out with a free and secure service. Your data is end-to-end encrypted and can only be read by your recipient (and you, of course).