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Bottled Video is a great resource for absolutely free video footage of just about anything you can imagine. They pride themselves on being there for students and other video producers who think that "if only we had this shot we could do complete this project".  Bottled Video could be used by middle school or high school students to add some neat footage to video projects. It's a high quality site with high quality footage so I'd give this resource an A+. Honestly, I didn't even know sites like this existed, but I'm glad to know now. Obviously projects would be the best way to integrate this resource into the classroom. I really think it would be easy to teach the kids to use as well. All they really have to do is include a line in the credits and they're good to go. As long as the school gives them ample amounts of storage to download the videos, I don't see any problems in using this one.

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.

OpenPhoto is a free source of stock photos that only require attribution. The photos are searchable and span many organized categories. Some of the photos are high quality, and others aren't quite what I'd call HD, but it's fairly easy to track down what you need. I see no reason why middle school and high school students couldn't use this site. Anytime they needed a picture for a PowerPoint or some other project they were working on, I could direct them to this site to get great photos that are easily attributed to the creators thanks to handy copy and paste instructions on the individual photo's site. I don't see many issues arising with this one. I'm hoping everything here is clean (haven't searched too deeply to ensure it's all school appropriate). Overall, it looks like an easy way to find pictures to add to presentations, projects, and other activities without infringing on copyright.

Librivox might be my favorite of all open source, copyright free resources for the Language Arts classroom. Started as a non-profit to benefit the blind, Vibrivox has created an amazing database that allows readers to record individual chapters of a novel or story that is in the public domain. These files are then made available to the visually impaired or anyone in need of an audio version of a written work. I use this resource extensively for students who are reading below grade level or have significant processing difficulty. I have also had several students "donate" their readings to the database as a community service project to benefit the overall community. If you are looking for public domain eBooks for your classroom, Project Gutenberg is another great resource.

Musopen is a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. They provide recordings,sheet music and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Their mission is to "set music free". At Musopen, they obtain recordings of public domain music that have no copyrights so that visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Most of the music is of classical piano or symphony pieces. Clips can be searched by Composer, Performer, Instrument, Period or Form. Downloading clips requires users to have an account, which is free. The audience for this site is open ended. Anyone from Elementary School students to the oldest of the population can easily discover music which can be used in any project they wish. It is very easy to search and download the .mp3 version of the music for use in project creation. The quality of the offerings it is excellent. Additionally, being Classical in nature, they do not "get in the way" of an overall project. This is extraordinarily beneficial if using the music as a background piece. This blessing is also the limitation; you do not have a wide range of genres from which to choose. If you want something outside the Classical field, you should investigate other free-music sites. To test this resource, I created a test podcast with the free application Audacity in which I spoke into a microphone to record my voice. I was then able to add a piece from this site as background music for the podcast. It worked very well. Teachers and students will find this to be just one of the many uses for music from this site. It is appropriate for similar presentations whether they be Prezi productions or videos published on YouTube-type sites. The only limitation is the range of possible music styles. If a classical piece is your preferred choice, however, Musopen is a wonderful site to visit

Download royalty free music for use in films, YouTube, and other projects, with no copyright restrictions.

Images on this site are under creative commons and are free to use on web sites and other projects. There are many, many types of animals on this site. There are probably animals listed that the children have not even thought of before. The animals are alphabetically listed, with many detailed animals under the broad list of animals. An example is parakeets. Then are many types of parakeets from which the children can choose. They also have animals broken down into types of primates, rodents, mammals etc. I don't really see a difficulty with this site. It seems pretty straight forward and easy to use.

Pictures of Animals -- Animal Photos! This website contains pictures of animals listed in alphabetical order. Some of the pictures may lack that professional quality, but the list is long. It is a great website for science, social studies, language arts and elementary school projects. This website is listed under the Creative Commons as free to use on websites and other projects. One especially nice feature which makes it great for younger students to easily give credit is that it provides the crediting information for you, simply copy and paste the html code or the name of the source.

Project Gutenburg is one of the oldest communities for the spread of the written word on the internet. For its inception, PG has been in the process of digitizing literature in the public domain and continues to update its library of over 45,000 free ebooks daily. This is an amazing resource for the majority of ELA courses, distance learning, and online classroom management systems. It has been truly invaluable in British Literature because almost the entire curriculum has been converted to digital form. It is also amazing for distance learning like Plato and Odysseyware that do not always provide the text with the learning software. If you would like these books in audio form, check out Librivox.

Project Gutenburg is one of the oldest communities for the spread of the written word on the internet. For its inception, PG has been in the process of digitizing literature in the public domain and continues to update its library of over 45,000 free ebooks daily. This is an amazing resource for the majority of ELA courses, distance learning, and online classroom management systems. It has been truly invaluable in British Literature because almost the entire curriculum has been converted to digital form. It is also amazing for distance learning like Plato and Odysseyware that do not always provide the text with the learning software. If you would like these books in audio form, check out Librivox.

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 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.

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 site provides an immense library of clip art images that can be used by teachers and students royalty free. Each item comes with a choice of size and format and even gives instruction on how to use proper citations for school projects. This is a tool that can be used for projects or presentations made my teachers and students and could be useful in engaging learners by giving them visuals that are associated with the material that they are learning in any discipline. The only issue that I can forsee with using images from this site is making sure the proper citation is included in the project or presentation. But, this is is a teaching moment for many of us outside of our discipline in which we can stress the importance of giving credit to sources where we borrow images, ideas, video, and more.

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.

I've used Incompotech a few times for projects of my own and I'm happy to say that it's a great resource for free music. It has very detailed, yet basic, instructions on how to attribute the music to the creator and features some neat tracks (although some are little cheesy). Having used this one before, I can commit to saying that I'd venture to try this one out with middle school students and definitely high school students. With plenty of up-front modeling and lots of reinforcement along the way, I think this would be a great resource to make student-produced video  go from quiet and boring to emotional and energetic. As with any download, it would be important to know that the school offers each student enough storage to save these files, but that'd be the only major issue with this resource. None of the tracks have words (to my knowledge) so everything is school-appropriate. It's easy to use and is even searchable by genre and "feel".

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.

This is a website designed for free downloads of a variety of types of sound. You can click on the sound tab and browse and find what you would like to download and it is free. This website can be used in an educational resource for middle school or high school age students doing a video project or PowerPoint project that will require background sound. Some difficulties I have found is the sound quality can vary between some of the sound clips. In order to download the sounds you must register an account you'll be able to begin. This could also be a difficulty for some students in a school setting depending on the school's firewall and if the student has an email. The tool I have found most useful with this site is the search bar and assisting you with finding the sound clips you want to hear or download.

www.videezy.com is a site with 20 to 90 second video clips that are free for download.  The categories include water, culture, sports, and animals along with many other areas that could be beneficial in a video based project.  The video clips do not have sound and they will integrate into narrated projects very easily.   Teachers can use the video footage in their flipcharts to engage students into the content.  A video clip of the Hindenburg disaster lasts about a minute, but gives students a visual of what actually occurred.  These video clips can also serve as backgrounds for text pages as students create videos.   Even with the great free choices, the site will pull up clips that are not free.  Working with video is always more challenging than photos and so this will be better for older students to work with.  High school and maybe upper level middle school students would benefit from this site the most.

This website has thousands of free images that are able to downloaded for free. Many of the images you will find on this site are high quality and well done. You can find an image for a variety of subjects. This website would be best used by students middle school or high school looking for images for a project or PowerPoint presentation. The difficulties a student might run into is the search engine used for this site. It can be very broad when looking for specific pictures. The best use of this website could be for a history class or science class. For example finding pictures for a WWII project can be done very easy for a student at the secondary level. A student would be able to find maps of where the war took place, famous images from the war, types of weapons used, types of planes, etc.

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 resource is for usage of images that could down loaded for the classroom. It could be utilized for making craft projects or graphics for science in the fourth grade. It has graphic photos of animals, insects, plants, and more. It could be useful to other elementary grade levels if they are creating animal or insect habitats and ecosystems. It could be used for other subjects as well. This is a royalty free website where all clip art images are free, with the exception of the banner, and any photographs that will be utilized for resale or pleasure purposes. It is also suggested that the use of more than six of the images not be used on one project. Images may be sold as collage sheets or pintable's as long as the six image rule is adhered to.