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MERLOT which stands for "Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching" is repository site that contains images, video, as well as audio. The site contains information suitable for all grade levels k-12, however the resources being looked at or 9-12 Science resources. MERLOT is an established community of resources that offers a variety of resources to its members. User can browse for material across many different subject matters. They can also create a collection of resources to use with learning exercises to practice or teach concepts. MERLOT also provides its user with the opportunity to meet and collaborate with expert's virtually form all over.

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.

Originally shared by Julia Hollins on 15 Jul 13. The original post was removed and this one shared instead, due to technical issue with the original post. This site provides free music, photos and videos. The second criterion is it had to be a repository. Repositories are large storage spaces for indexing, retrieving and managing visual information. The user may find a database using any of the text-based meta-search engines. These were extremely helpful in locating the three sources used for evaluation. The third criterion used to evaluate online video and photo repositories was whether or not the content progressed into developing a visual information retrieval system. Some of the methods for retrieving digital images and videos were easier than others. Some queries used features such as colors, textures, shapes, motions and spatiotemporal compositions (Chang, Smith, Beigi, & Benitez, 1997). Lastly, the fourth criterion used to evaluate the online photo repositories was whether it had multimedia features. The repository databases classify information according to the domains that use them. For example, online repositories used by museums, libraries, archives and photo stock differ by the following features: 1) automation, 2) abstraction, 3) content collection, and 4) generability and categorization.

Users of this site should be advised that resources are royalty free. Please check the legal details on the following page: http://www.pond5.com/legal/

I re-located this resource, that has been around since the year 2000, while searching for AUDIO files for adding to multimedia presentations for but, the site also advertises that, "you can find over 1,000 pages of free resources, tutorials, PowerPoint templates and backgrounds, graphics, sounds for presentations and much more for everyday use and productivity." The sound clips are simple enough for students in grades 5 - 12 to use however, many of the other resources are probably more appropriate for educators. After brief teacher modeling, middle & high school students could easily click on the midi sound files, listen to the preview that opens in Windows Media Player, right-click on the sound title they wanted, "save-target-as" to a file, and insert the free sound clips into their multimedia presentations. Students will also appreciate the wide variety of clear-quality, relevant sounds, a few of which sound like renditions of background hip-hop/rap music that I believe they would enjoy like, "Dr. Tekno," "Nightfunk," and "R&B Bassbeat." In the "Terms of Use" the owner, Nan Shastry, states that "items marked 100% free" can be downloaded free for "personal or business or educational use" but users may not resell downloads, make available as downloads on your website, or link to items without prior permission. While the sound files and many other resources are 100% free, students who try to branch out and download many of the PowerPoint backgrounds or animated graphics will encounter zip file popups that ask/require them to evaluate "WinRAR" software for a 40-day trial before purchasing it, to continue using the download. Educators could mitigate this problem by distributing a list of preferred download link titles from the site that students could easily access without any difficulty or, by simply instructing them to click "cancel" or "close" on any of the downloads that require purchasing.

Convert files like images, video, documents, audio and more to other formats with this free and fast online converter. This resource is a great tool that can be used by teachers or students. It can be used to create multimedia projects that help teachers to delivery content information. In addition students can use it to create various types of projects that they can embed into power point presentations or if they are trying to make a movie project. A problem that could possibly arise may be that the school district has put a block on the website. To get mitigate this issue the teacher should contact the technology support team and ask for them to take the block off of this particular website. Also students will need to be explicitly taught copyright laws and citing procedures.

Beautifully rendered digital content including clipart, photos, fonts, templates, illustrations and more appropriate for student view and use but best suited to a teacher's purposes e.g. avatars for student labels or images for multimedia presentations. While the majority of materials on this site are not free, they DO offer free goods from featured artists every week! No membership fee is required. Content outside of the weekly features does cost money, but patrons are directly supporting, "independent creatives around the world," and are granted Creative Market's simple license with every purchase, the details of which can be found here: https://creativemarket.com/licenses/simple. Additionally, it is important to note that in certain cases, "portions of some products may be covered by an open source software license such as the GPL (GNU General Public License). In these cases, any portions of the product not covered by an open source license will be covered by this license."

This resource specializes in stock footage from around the world. All of the video clips are free to download and to use. There is no subscription or user login required in order to use the footage. This feature makes it ideal to use for educators looking to provide their students with a ready source of footage that they can use for their multimedia presentations. Students interested in media production and editing could create some fantastic presentations, especially if they have access to editing software and a green screen. The more advanced applications of the video clips could be used by high school students, but I could also see middle school aged students utilizing various clips to help with creating presentations for World History or Biology classes. For example, in my 7th grade Life Science class we do a project on the biomes of the world. Students could use the video files from the "Animal Footage" section to incorporate dynamic visuals into their reports. Students could also use footage from different continents to visually identify the various biomes for the class. Modeling of how to download, edit and embed the videos would be necessary to ensure that the students experience success with this resource, but that is just a matter of scheduling instruction time prior to the final projects being completed. The website is very easy to navigate and all clips are easily imported into any editing platforms. This feature makes it easy to use for educators who may have a variety of software on their school computers, depending on which school system they work in.

To use resources from this site, you will be required to pay an annual fee - at the time of this entry, $25.

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.

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 website is a government site, so it is a public domain and provides all resources including photos, videos, animations and podcasts for free to the public. The acronym USGS stands for United States Geological Survey, which means the photos and resources on this site pertain to elements of the geologic structure in the U.S. This site would be useful for all audiences of school age in grades 4-12. I chose that range because with the real-life depictions of our country's geography, it could easily bore and audience that was any younger. They are excellent quality resources and precise photography at our disposal for nothing out of pocket.

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.

Thousands of copyright free and copyright friendly images and photos for teachers and students. This site contains different categories of pictures. The rights belong to the owners of the pictures. Students and teachers are free to use the pictures for projects, teaching, posters, multimedia and educational purpose. This site also contains ideas, trading posts, activities and other resources for teachers and students. Latina

Pcs4 Learning is designed for education and is "copyright friendly" and searchable. It contains five popular categories, animals, food, education, space, and countries. Click on collections, however, and plethora of other categories appear. Click on the lesson plans link and teachers will find ideas for using pictures in lesson plans. A small sample of the lessons that appear includes symmetry, alliteration and ancient cultures. The pictures on this website have been donated by educators, students, and amateur photographers. Images here are suitable for grades k-12, any subject.

Morguefile.com has millions of royalty-free stock photos that could be used in the classroom for multimedia projects, websites, videos, portfolios, or any projects. I could use this website in any of my business/marketing classrooms for students to have an easy access to images. The images are easy to download therefore, I don't foresee any difficulties or problems with using the site.

Pics4Learning.com has free images for educational use.  This site is useful for K-12 and has many different categories of images.  The images have photographer information, location, and date taken.  There is even a citation available in the image information to assist students with the proper information to give the photographer credit.  This would be extremely useful for younger students to learn how to cite their findings.  The site also allows easy download for Windows, Macintosh, Android, and iPad devices.  Users can also save directly to Google Drive.  Our system now has Google Drive accounts for all of our students and so there is no need for flash drives any more! The images found here would be great for foreign language classes.  Students and teachers alike could use these specific images to work with vocabulary presentations or reviews.  Science classes could use the animal images for classification.  Teachers using flipchart software could create containers for the images to be moved to by the students. The only issue I can foresee with this site is the number of images available.  Users might not be able to find exactly what they are looking for.  Fortunately, educators are able to take photographs and contribute them to the website.  This could be beneficial to teachers and students.

Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos & images for classrooms, multimedia projects, websites, videos, portfolios, or any projects in an educational setting. I can see Pics4Learning being used for all grades. There are pictures of animals which would be good for science classes, pictures of countries that could be beneficial to social studies classrooms, and pictures broken down by subject including math and reading. Students could use these pictures for any of their projects, videos, or portfolios. I can also see teachers getting ideas from the "education" section under popular collections. I do not foresee any problems or challenges with this site. The pictures are easy to download and the option to cite each image. You just select whether you are downloading for Windows, Mac, iPad, or Android.