Group items tagged

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.

Timetoast is a place to create timelines that you can add to your blog or website. You can create historical timelines of important events, or build a timeline of your vacation. Time toast is a website that allows a person to create an interactive timeline. I would use this to show information as an interactive study guide. Or I would use it to post on my blog so that students can review the information that was presented during the course of a particular unit of study. A difficulty of this site is that it may be blocked by the school district technology department.

the web site of The New York Public Library Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection Online. This site is copyright free. It contains a multitude of historical pictures. These pictures are listed to be created before 1923. One will find pictures of animals, fashion, hair, people, textile, period pieces. The pictures on this website would be very useful in creating a project or paper about history. If you are going to use these pictures for other reason than personal or project usage, you will need to get special permission. Latina Hill

This website is amazing. Once you sign up for a free account, you are able to download and use thousands of high quality images. Teachers can incorporate these pictures into their personal PowerPoints, Prezis, etc. or they can have their students use the pictures in projects. There are many beautiful landscape photos. This would be a great opportunity for 5th graders to gather pictures of different landforms and make a presentation using them.

Photogen offers free images for commercial and personal use. There is no sign up or registration to download images. The images can be found through the direct search option or under the categories section on the homepage. It offers a wide range of categories of images. This site could be used for upper elementary, middle, and high school students in any content area. This site is easy to navigate and the images download in seconds. The only concern is that the homepage contains ads for other free image repositories that could confuse students and take them to another site. This issue could be fixed with having a 'teachable moment' students about internet advertising.

Users of resources found on this site are advised to read the terms of use page - there are some use restrictions. See here: http://www.photogen.com/terms-of-use/

Stock Footage for Free is a video clip repository of royalty-free video clips that can be used in both personal and commercial video productions. The clips are broadcast quality sponsored by Footage Firm and were create for the sole purpose of free use. The site is appropriate for all grade levels and teachers to create and enhance various educational lessons. A free site registration of a username, password, and working email is required to activate the account.

The clips are preview-able prior to download either through an embedded YouTube or Flash player. There are general categories that can be browsed to aid in selecting a video clip for use.

Teacher Tap is much like what this group has collaborated to do. It is an online repository that list several other resources that those in the education field can you to locate copyright free and royalty free images, clip art, text, and music. It can be used for anyone in an education setting and for some personal use. Upon review of the site, all links lead to relevant sources that can be used individually or in conjunction with another. The home page provides the sources in a broken down list format and even identifies the sites that have varying restrictions. I chose this site a something to be used because it provided another list of multiple sources that should be bookmarked. Additionally the content appears to be better for those in a K-12 setting but can still prove very resourceful to those that are in a collegiate setting as well. This is a great source to other sources. There is absolutely no fee for access to the compiled list provided.

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.

This online database contains very high-quality "Public Domain," "Copyright-Free" photographs that are easily accessible from 10 different category divisions on the "Gallery Index" page; Abstract, Architecture & Cityscapes, Food & Drinks, Industrial & Machinery, Miscellaneous, Nature, Sports & Recreation, Technology, Textures & Backgrounds, and Travel. In the "Terms of Use" statements, the creators state that "Picdrome.com is a growing Public Domain digital photography collection, free of copyright and licensed under Creative Commons…all images are free to download for personal, educational and commercial use, without restriction." They also advise users to check the "Disclaimer" statement link regarding any additional licenses; however, in the disclaimer statement there didn't appear to be any other restrictions listed. Students in upper Elementary school through High school would be able to easily navigate and download these photographs that were relevant to project work they were completing. For example, my Middle School students would greatly benefit from the close-up photos of food from all of the food groups in this repository, when they complete "Family & Consumer Science" class projects that present visual examples of nutritionally balanced menus. The only problematic portion of the website is the banner advertisement located directly below the title/search box and right above the category links…it often advertises products and sites that require purchasing but, the banner looks so much like the website heading that it is easily clicked on by "mistake." Educators would need to forewarn students of this obstacle before giving them free reign of the site's valuable images.

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.

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 offers free downloads to music offered up by various artists for use in video projects both commercial and personal. If the music is to be used for commercial use, Jamendo simply reminds its users that all artists are protected under the Creative Commons License. I covered this license in my other post, however this license isn't only about attribution. The license allows the creator of the content to identify the exact usage for their material in commercial use. This allows the downloader of the music to still download the music for free, but with a blanket of customized protection for the artist. The audience I would use this site with would again be a high school broadcasting class. Many high school newscasts that are shown within the school every morning do not follow copyright laws. If the students producing these newscasts used Jamendo to download the music content for the newscast, the students would not only stay legal, but learn a very important broadcasting rule that would stick with them throughout their career. The quality of the content on Jamendo is mostly very well done. However, as with any music website, most of the music downloaded depends on user preferences. The production quality is usually very well done since these artists are attempting to push their music to the public to get their sound and style of music to the larger audiences.

This site provides a wealth of royalty free video footage for use in advertising, blogging, websites and even presentations. This resource provides video, photographic and audio resources on a royalty-free basis. This means that the user pays for the initial download of the content, without having to pay the original photographer or artist for each use of the material. The terms of agreement on this website also provides a $10,000 Legal Guarantee that protects the user of the content up to that amount. I personally, would use this site with middle and high school geography students. In many cases, geography falls into a social studies or science class if I recall correctly. Many of the video clips available have amazing video shots of different landforms and natural formations of nature. In order to show multiple sequences of various land forms, this site would be great for having instant access to incredible video clips. The quality of the work in the video portion of this website is remarkable. All of the content is shot in high quality and is downloadable in a range of size and quality. This site allows the for user to download in various frames per second as well to determine the exact quality available to the user for download.

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.