"Reusing existing Open Educational Resources (OER) can save significant time and effort. The OPEN partners recommend TAACCCT grantees invest up-front time finding OER to reuse rather than starting development of new educational resources right away. A significant benefit of OER is that they provide source material to build your development efforts around. No need to invest development effort in creating something that already exists.
OER come in a wide variety of types. Many educators are simply looking for individual media elements to use within their courses, such as photos, graphics, videos, and audio, that are openly licensed in a way that freely permits education use.
The page below will help you find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses. To jump directly to what you are searching for use these links:"
"The Practical Ed Tech Handbook isn't just a list of my favorite resources. I've included ideas for using these resources and in many cases I've included links to video tutorials about my favorite resources.
In The Practical Ed Tech Handbook you will find resources arranged in seven categories; communication with students & parents, web search strategies, digital citizenship, video creation, audio production, backchannels & informal assessment, and digital portfolios."
One appplication that comes to mind is to let the students create walkabouts for the school for prospective students or create a audio recordal of outings to historic places.
"PBS LearningMedia™ is your destination for easy, instant access to tens of thousands of classroom-ready, digital resources including videos and interactives perfect for the Interactive Whiteboard, plus audio and photos, and even in-depth lesson plans. You can search, save, and share with ease. Best of all, PBS LearningMedia™ is free for educators. Register today!"
"Thinglink can be used to turn any static image into an interactive, multimedia image. Yesterday, we used PicMonkey and PicCollage to create collages about what a good learning environment looks like to us. After creating those collages we saved them as PNG files and uploaded them to Thinglink where we added videos, audio files, and links to articles to enhance our collages and make them interactive."
"Welcome to our Royalty Free Sounds from Creative Commons and Public Domain only at SoundBible.com These sounds are completely royalty free, meaning you can use them commercially without paying a cent."
"Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom."