Group items tagged

There is a wide variety of copyright free music that is free for some educational uses and some student uses as well as personal YouTube videos. However, there is a price involved with using the audio clips in other formats. You can search by music type, and then you are presented with a great selection. You can also upload a video clip and apply your audio selection to it. Another useful tool is the ability to create playlists of your favorite selections. Music can add that extra element to a presentation or lesson and this would be a wonderful site to use for that. This site could be used in any subject area and all grade levels.

Sound Jay has an assortment of great sound clips to use in flip charts, presentations, or videos.  The sound clips are extremely realistic and so practical.  Students and teachers can really enhance their products with these well-placed sound bites. Did you know that fire had a sound?  Need a certain sound for a website button?  Students and teachers could use these very realistic sounds to accompany their video clips that do not have sound.  A literature class could have an audio assignment where the students create a scene from the book and these sounds would be the perfect addition to the podcast. The downloads are available in wav and mp3 format and they download very quickly.  The clips are typically very short and students might struggle with extending the sound in a loop.  The downloads are free, but there are a lot of advertisements and other "pay" options that might confuse younger users.  I would recommend this site for middle or high school students.

Free Photos and Free Images for personal, educational and non-commercial usage. This website is so neat - it has a huge library of copyright free photos. You don't have to have an account to look through the photos or download them, so that's another plus to this website. All of the photos you find on this website are free to use for personal or non-commercial use. I loved seeing the different types of photos - I just searched a random topic to see what came up and the variety was great. This resource would be great for Middle or High School students to use in any subject area.

Motion Elements provides some nice background stock footage, some computer generated background footage and some title imagery. Examining the site in closer detail, I would describe the target audience for this site to be fairly universal. While scanning through the vast offerings I did not see any content that I would deem "inappropriate". I would suggest, however, that older students have an easier time with the general concept of video production that younger students, so this site may benefit them more. The free videos are of very good quality, but there are only about 5 pages of them. If you want to diversify your options, then videos can cost from $20 to $50, so I would stay with the free ones. One the plus side, the free clips do contain high definition (HD) content. If they have something you can use, you will be highly pleased with the quality. From a technical standpoint, the video clips that I downloaded to try were all in .mov format. .mov is an extension associated with Apple and its QuickTime platform, so use of these clip on Apple products, Macs for example, is certainly possible. However, I was able to easily add downloaded clips into Windows Movie Maker for editing as well with absolutely no hiccups, whatsoever. This means that not only will teachers and students benefit from easily downloaded clips covering a vast variety of subjects, they should have no difficulty using the clips on any computer platform they may be limited to in their educational setting.

pdsounds.org offers a free sound library with a variety of interesting sound effects from a German bar to writing with an ink pen. The sound volunteers utilize recording equipment to capture hundreds of sounds for copyright free, public use and tag them with a set of tags that help in the search process. You do not need a membership to access the free sound files, and you are able to submit sounds to be added to the catalog. These sound effects are perfect for incorporation into presentations and videos. In my high school business education classroom, these sound effects will enhance our projects. For instance, if a student created a marketing video with still images of tea products, the tea pouring sound effect would be helpful. In commercials, the effects can be used to make the situation more lifelike...birds in the background of a kitchen scene, or cars in the background of a busy sidewalk. Students will enjoy searching the clip options and finding just the right combination. I give this site a 4 on a 1-5 scale, because of the variety of clips, the ability to post clips, and the ease of searching via tags and simple downloading. To improve, I would like to see thousands of sounds available for download.

This site has pictures, information, and training material. This site is more suited for high school students as this is health information, and all of the pictures may not be appropriate for younger children.

Offers digital photos of cars organized by make and model. The car pictures are of reasonably good quality. This could potentially be suitable for high school or college automotive classes, economics classes, or even environmental science classes. The resources could be used in Digital stories, Prezi, and PowerPoints. They could be imbedded in other virtual documents, or Educational websites, provided the licensing agreement was followed. The photos are royalty-free and there are no fees. Potential Problems and solutions: The problems lie not with the photo repositories themselves, but rather lie in the educator's own ability to think creatively, and to work with raw digital materials. I can think of no better solution than for an educator to spend time examining how the available resources can be used to encourage a student to think about the subject matter. A teacher can plan for an elaborate lesson but discover there is a dearth of photo content; therefore, since time and money are not unlimited, the teacher would be wise to consider this before planning a lesson. Further, a teacher would be wise to search for as many resources as possible and add them to a list, as we have done for this assignment. Quality: B All viewed photos are of good quality, though they tend to vary in resolution. Using such images may require a bit of creativity.

Photo Pin is a search engine that allows you to search by tags. Its photos are taken from Flickr using API which searches for creative commons photos. When it opens up, there are check boxes to search for specific license types. Even typing in benign words like sink rendered many photos to choose from and most of the pictures were artistically taken. The images come in various sizes and the HTML code is right there when you open the photo. Be careful not to click on the images above the line. These are sponsored images and will ask for a fee. Some images contained scantily clothed and provocative individuals when a few choice words were entered into the search engine. Because of this, this site should be reserved for high school students only.

Dorret Goodwin, Animated Gif Archive This is a fun website that has thousands of free animations for educational purposes. I could see me using this in my high school Computer Application classes when they want to add some "life" to their projects. The website is easy to navigate since everything is listed alphabetically and I didn't have any issues with downloading the animations.

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-program/ Royalty free music is a paid website that allows educational institutions free access to their website through their Free Music for Education Program. The major obstacle in using this website would be getting over the hurdle or having technology services approve the website and have a link placed on the school's website for students to obtain access. Teachers can use the website to teach students about the copyright rules and laws Once approved students of all ages would have a huge catalogue of sound effects and downloadable music and from a variety of genres at their fingertips. .

Educators who wish to use resources from this site need to visit this page: http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-resources.html

This site offers royalty free background music for just $0.99 for each track. In addition, the site has over 1,000 free music teaks available for download. The site offers numerous music genres to pick from and will let you hear a sample of the track before you download. I have used this site in the past for videos and have been very pleased with the selection of music this site offers and how easy the site is to use. This site may be best suited for older students, but could be used with elementary aged students with teacher assistance. This site is great source to use when helping students create video projects. For example, last semester I created a documentary video focusing on the Cherokee Native Americas. Jewel Beat had several tracks of Native American background music to choose from. Add this music to my video made my work more authentic. I think student will enjoy being able to pick out their own music to add to their video without worrying about infringing on copyright holders. One possible problem I see with this site is that most of the music tracks cost $0.99. While this is not very much, this could lead to problems when helping a room full of students create videos especially since it would involve the use of billing a credit card. It may be best to just mention this source to your students as a possible choice.

This serpent dragon clip art is perfect for use on your fantasy books and magazines, game projects, webpages, school projects, etc. This clip art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License which means you must provide credit to the creator of the clip art which is focaclipart.wordpress.com if you plan on using this clip art on your projects. I found lots of clip art images on this site, it was easy to navigate and well organized. I would use this site in my Computer Applications classroom. There are times were Windows don't have the exact clip art you are looking for so this will give them a quick and easy additional resource to locate that special image. I don't foresee any problems with the easy of downloading the image only challenge might be if the site is down for maintenance.

Freepik is a search engine for free photos, vectors, illustrations, and PSD files to download. Videos are available to download for a fee. The images are linked to original hosting website. The site host millions of pictures and the content is appropriate for students of all ages to use. During my preview of the website I notice images appropriate to use in social studies, science and other content area. The images are camera generated and animated. I do not foresee any problems in using the site because the content is filtered and is safe for young children to browse.

In completing a work-related project, I found some great sites that assist educators in locating open educational resources. The Orange Grove Digital Repository is one of those resources. If you have not used it before, it is a repository of instructional resources. It can be integrated with a Learning Management System and educators can import resources directly from a teacher's LMS. The collection of resources consists of open textbooks and open courseware. There are resources for higher education and K -12, both of which contain categories that are easy to navigate. Among the available content: videos, presentations, audio, spreadsheets, syllabi, assessments, and images.