Open Digital Media Resources for Project-Based Learning with Technology

Open licenses such as creative commons have led to the proliferation of sites that offer free and open digital media resources. These websites offer music, audio, video, clip art, and pictures under open licenses that allow you to edit remix and mash up media files for project-based learning experiences. See a quick and dirty guide to copyright on my blog here. Media files on these websites can be downloaded and incorporated into educational projects. Using open-licensed media in project-based learning can save students and teachers a lot of time and difficulty. This post is an excerpt from my book, Educational Technology for Teachers. In a master's project, we used open digital media resources of the Nixon Kennedy debates to create a video about blogs and wikis. This video shows that students can use these resources to show their learning in many different and creative ways. Here is a list of my favorite websites that offer open digital media resources for project-based learning:

MULTIPLE MEDIA FORMATS
• Creative Commons Search - Search for open-licensed media
• Wikimedia Commons - Open photographs, videos and sounds
• The Internet Archive - Open photographs, videos and sounds
• The Library of Congress - Public domain media

PHOTOGRAPHS AND CLIPART
• WP Clipart - Public domain clip art for education
• Open Clipart - Public domain clip art
• Morguefile - Free and open photographs
• Pixabay - Public domain photographs and clip art

VIDEO
• YouTube - A vast collection of videos, some of which are open licensed
• The Open Video Project - A repository of digitized videos, some of which are open licensed
• Bottled Video - A collection of free stock video clips

AUDIO
• Freesound - Open-licensed sound effects
• CC Mixter - Open-licensed music
• Musopen - Classical public domain music

When students and teachers download a media file from one of these sites, they must pay close attention to the license under which the media file is released and be sure to meet license requirements. Usually this means attributing the original author by mentioning them in a credits or citations section. Another way to attribute the original author could be to link online to the location of the original media file or to the profile page for the author.