Tuesday, December 1, 2015

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.

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