Activities for Coronavirus Quarantine – The Ultimate List of Digital Entertainment
Friends, this is not an easy time for any of us. Some of us have family members and loved ones who are going through a difficult time, and others are isolated at home with little to do.
The small silver lining: the longer this isolation goes on, the more digital resources appear.
Masa Israel has opened our Masa ONLINE! Community featuring tons of activities, programs, webinars, and lectures every day. We’re constantly adding to the calendar and keeping our community, well, a community. Check the calendar here for all our scheduled programming.
Aside from our amazing content, organizations and companies worldwide have opened up their worlds to all of us, giving the phrase “having the world at your fingertips” an all-too-literal meaning. Want to visit the zoo? Getting the itch to travel? Interested in going back to school? You got it.
Check out the list below of all the platforms to keep you entertained (and sane) during the upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, remember – we’re going to get through this. Every one of us, together.
Professional development
- Yale opened up one of their most popular classes to the outside world, “The Science of Well-Being”, which we probably all need to sign up for immediately. The course is on Coursera, the renowned platform that allows you to take courses for fun or for certificates and degrees
- For you Hebrew speakers, Campus IL is a great tool to accumulate academic credit while you’re still in high school, gain new skills, get yourself ready for the future job market, learn for the pyschometric exam, or expand your horizons through a wide variety of quality courses.
- Feeling a little more creative? You can take classes in illustration, photography, design, and more on Skillshare.
- MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.
- Join a programming workshop run by Codebar – a non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community.
- If you want to learn to code in R (for statistics) check out the five free courses through HACKERNOON
- Learn something new every day on Curious!
- Virtual Meetups: Think Agile, Think AgileSparks. Check out this virtual meetup out to understand more about Agile and Technical Excellency.
- edX is the trusted platform for education and learning, with over 2,500 online courses from 140 top universities. Join here for free online courses.
- Khan Academy also offers an array of remote learning options for those who may want it.
Music
- Talking to my Hebrew speakers again: Zappa has put together a list of live-stream concerts, for which most of Israel has come together to perform/watch.
- NPR has released a list of concerts that you can stream live, including jazz, folk, rock, country, etc.
- JamBase has come out with a Couch Tour Alert, during which you can “enjoy live music with no bathroom lines from the comfort of your own couch”.
Arts & Leisure
- Broadway fan? You don’t have to wait for the isolation to end, here are 15 Broadway plays and musicals you can watch on stage from home.
- SlowTV has always done a good job of putting people at ease and is definitely worth a shot during all this chaos.
- The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC offers two online exhibits through Google Arts & Culture, as well as the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Museé d’Orsay in Paris, and more.
- Speaking of Google Arts & Culture, they offer a never ending list of famous artworks to explore, machine learning experiments, general “food for thought” – you name it.
- Join a virtual walking tour of somewhere you want to visit on Wind Walk Travel Videos’ YouTube channel.
- Close your eyes after a long day of remote work and listen to your choice of audiobooks on Spotify. Audiobooks has their own profile, offering “Audiobook Best Sellers” and “Audiobook of the Week” playlists, and Spotify created their own 62-hour playlist of audiobooks which you can find here.
Animals
- Take a break from remote work and visit the zoo! Spend some time in the elephant yard over at the Houston Zoo or visit the Koala’s at the Edinburgh Zoo.
- The Georgia Aquarium has live cameras for your choosing: Southern Sea Otter webcam, Beluga Whale webcam, Underwater Puffin webcam, and, of course, the African Penguin webcam.
- Thinking bigger? EarthCam offers live webcam streamings of animals all over the world – you can watch more elephants in Indonesia, bison and falcons in Illinois, sea otters in California, and much more.
Mental Wellness
- TED Talks offers videos of talks about pretty much everything – two of our top playlists to listen to currently are Talks to help you manage stress and Give thanks.
- On the “giving thanks” note, you might want to look into gratitude practice. Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence explains that “more than any other personality trait, gratitude is strongly linked to mental health and life satisfaction”. Try the app Gratitude, see where it goes.
- Join Shine, the self-care community that offers “daily support for your stress and anxiety”.
- Adriene Mishler, founder of Yoga with Adriene, has created a playlist called Yoga for Uncertain Times. You don’t have to be a seasoned yogi to reap the benefits from these practices.
