Karen’s Mashups

Picking up from our last show on free audio resources, this time we’re going to spotlight free visual resources, including clip art, photos, and video footage. All the resources in this show are covered by a “copyleft” license that allows you and your students to use them free of charge and legally in your projects.

As with all of our shows, please feel free to share this in whatever way you’d like.

The pieces we’ve included come from various sources and have different licenses, so make sure to check the lists below for the specifics. Some of the stock photo sites have their own licenses (I wish everyone would use something more standard like Creative Commons), so make sure to read them to see if they cover your intended use. Whatever the license, it’s always important to attribute your sources.

As with all Internet content, make sure to screen the content before sharing with students. (There’s nothing unfriendly to a general audience in this show.)
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Here are some of the sources for “copyleft” visual resources that you might want to look at:

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 Free Visuals: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this show, we’re going to do something a little different, looking at sources for freely-usable audio materials. (See the list below for links.) It’s summer, and many of us are working on creating new curriculum resources. So in the next few shows, we’ll be highlighting free multimedia resources you can use and incorporate into your own work. Today we’ll be listening to a sample of great free audio material. Our next show will feature free sources for photos, clipart, and video. (Audio books, poetry, and distance learning courses will all be covered in future shows.)

These free resources will include public domain content, as well as “copyleft” content. Copyleft refers generally to content that is licensed for free use by others. This includes materials licensed under GNU licenses, as well as various Creative Commons licenses. The individual licenses vary, so make sure to read the terms. Some allow for modification of the materials (derivatives), for example using them in a mashup like this. Many require that you credit the source (attribution), which is always a good idea anyway. Some stipulate that the resulting product must be free to others as well (share and share alike).

This kind of licensing is a great boon to creative folks like us. Copyleft licensing may also revolutionize the world of education by providing a variety of free accessible educational materials that may one day replace commercial textbooks, software, and media resources.

As a side note, this show was a lot of fun to research, put together, and edit. (It was also more work than a normal show!) One of the challenges in editing audio and video is that there are so many file formats…for this show alone, I used mp3, oog, wav, aif, and flac files. If you’re looking for an easy way to convert all these, Audacity works with most. For those that it won’t handle, Zamzar is a good free online conversion tool.
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Here are some of the sources for “copyleft” audio that you might want to look at:

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 Show 7 - Free Audio [9:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download