Merlot - not wine tasting but resource finding

Last week I gave a Learnscope workshop for volunteer teachers in our department on the joys of Merlot. No, its not just a wine grape. Merlot is to quote their own web site

... "a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments....MERLOT is also a community of people who are involved in education."

Merlot is on my list of sites that I visit daily and I have been dropping in on it for years. It continues to amaze and delight me with its quality and diversity. It contains more than eight thousand resources, grouped into the following categories.

• Arts
• Business
• Education
• Humanities
• Mathematics
• Science and Technology
• Social Sciences

Resources may have ratings and assignments associated with them. Many of the resources are non-commercial/free and of very high quality.

You can browse and search entries and their associated notes without logging in. But if you become a member, you get an extra bonus. Merlot will give you the ability to store links that interest you in link collections that you can annotate. Membership is free.

People in the workshop I found things that they wanted to road test, resources that they could see themselves using straight away and a number of them became members of the spot. All this in a precious lunch time and I didn't even have any wines for them to taste :-)