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This website was originally created as a resource of 5,000 images concerning the American Civil War, but has since grown to include many more subject areas concerning U.S. History. The site is very easy to navigate and provides teachers and students with clear headings to find pictures from whatever specific area of U.S. History they are looking for. Here are just a few of the main headings used for categorizing the photos: Native Americans, Native American Culture, The Age of Exploration, Settlements and Colonies, Slavery in America, etc. I could easily see this resource being used by a high school U.S. History teacher, as well as by their students. A teacher could use this resource to add more visual meaning and interest to their own presentations or guided notes. Students, like-wise, could easily add relevant photos to their reports, presentations, or research projects. Students may require help with downloading the photos and embedding into their presentations, but this could be corrected with a simple modeling exercise where the teacher demonstrates how to navigate the site and download any desired photos. I really liked this site and have never seen it before. I plan on taking advantage of this year as I plan to create some new U.S. History assignments for my students.

In completing a work-related project, I found some great sites that assist educators in locating open educational resources. Merlot is one of those resources. If you have not used it before, it is a community of resources designed to focus on providing learning materials for faculty members in higher education. As a member of Merlot, you not only have access to the free online resources, but you can contribute material as well. There are also opportunities to become a peer reviewer of the posted content. I think this is an excellent way for an educator to be assured that the learning materials obtained from Merlot has a stamp of approval from others in the discipline.

This website offers a collection of out of copyright recordings, which would greatly serve to enhance a podcast. The site is easy to navigate and allows the user to download the audio file (MP3) to his/her desired location. After this file has been downloaded to the computer, students could then import the file into Audacity in order to edit the audio file to better fit their podcast. Student created podcasts would be a great way for middle school and high school students to convey their ideas or topics to a class. These can be done as individual or group projects. I especially see this type of activity being well suited for a Social Studies context, especially as a way to present research information. The correct application of music, to serve as an intro in a podcast, could greatly assist in the development of a polished final product. However, I would recommend sticking with the instrumental music for most uses within the educational context. But, the creation of a podcast within a history course could be enhanced with the accurate incorporation of time appropriate music. I believe for these music files to be incorporated into a podcast, to benefit the listener, the creator must have a working knowledge of Audacity. However, with the ability to pair Open Music Archive with Audacity can give the individual the tools necessary to create a product that would benefit learners through the multimedia platform.

Open Photo is an image related website that displays clipart and photo graphics from across the nation. It is a copyright free resource where individuals have posted their artwork so that others may use it for various purposes. Each is displayed by category and divided into their appropriate sections. It is intended for individuals of all ages. Users do have to create an account and they also are able to research the database for all photos by subject. These graphics can be used and inserted into projects, reports, and websites and used for means related to the user's needs. The graphics is medium to high quality, which is dependent upon the author's pictures and submission of the photo. The photos appear to have the ability to be used in other forms if needed for such use.

Images on this site are under Creative Commons Licensing, so each image may have specific restrictions. For reference, see the About page: http://www.openphoto.net/about/

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.

This online repository includes hundreds of copyright-free graphics that would be worthwhile for middle-high school students & educators to use to add a multitude of interesting "bells & whistles" to their word documents, multimedia presentations, or websites. In my 5th-8th grade Library Media Center, social studies students are currently completing PowerPoints presenting their research about assigned Middle Eastern countries. I can foresee allowing students who have finished adding all assigned subject content to their slides, use this site to add "spinning globe" bullets, horizontal rule section dividers in the shape of "International Flags" or "Palm Trees," and "Textured Sand" backgrounds. All of the graphics were easy to navigate to from a large table on the index page and everything I experimented with downloaded and inserted easily, the quality of the images was excellent, and many of the animations would be relevant for school assignments. In the "Terms of Use" section, the creators advertise that, "Bellsnwhistles.com graphics are free for your use and if you use them we ask that you PLEASE DOWNLOAD what you need…Do Not link to our graphics." I did not encounter anything on the site that required royalty fees or additional software to load before gaining access. The only problem educators might want to mention to students before using is to make sure they insert only school-appropriate graphics…while nothing on the site was unsuitable for student-viewing, there was a "Foaming Beer Mug" divider and "Dripping Blood" Halloween images that students would need to avoid downloading into projects.

Here are images from the Smithsonian's amazing libraries! Low resolution images from this web site may be downloaded free for "personal, research or study purposes." If you need a higher resolution image, there is a small fee, but the policy states that the downloadable images may be used for classroom and student purposes. There are some great things here for science, social studies and ELA projects.

This site provides free, stock video footage for users to download for commercial or personal use. This website though offers a different kind of stock video as well, motion graphics. Videvo offers a large library of basic motion graphics that are fantastic small additions or final edits to a video project. This site provides stock motion graphics that on the surface, seem very simple, yet are very complicated to build without knowledge of a program such as After Effects or Motion. The best audience for this site would be a high school broadcasting or a graphics class in which some high schools offer with basic skills of the programs previously mentioned. The quality of the video offered on Videvo is for the most part extremely well done. After some research on the site itself, some of the motion graphics do not always have great color detail or motion detail as you would expect in basic motion graphics. Those critiques though should not take away from the great graphics and stock video that is in fact offered on this site. Finally, although the footage and graphics are royalty-free, the website does require that the user attribute the Creative Commons License 3.0 to the author of the content where it is required. Basically, this means that not all of the content on this site requires any attribution whatsoever, but some do ask that users attribute through the Creative Commons License.