CC button: some rights reserved by Kalexanderson
As I learn more through my COETAIL course and as I try to practice what I preach and teach my students the importance of Creative Commons, sharing and attribution, I have had some interesting, sometimes challenging conversations with my students.
I keep emphasizing the importance of sharing and attribution both as the creator and the user. I feel like the kids are understanding the concept and are using it in school (and I hope it is trickling into their personal sharing), but what has been the most difficult, is finding high quality media. I have run into some problems with finding reliable Creative Commons media.
This week I was introduced to Compfight – it has a lot of high quality, interesting photos. And they make it really easy to give attribution to the creator. We’ve just installed the plug-in on our self-hosted WordPress blogs.
While I find Creative Commons images fairly easy to find. It is not easy to find good quality, appropriate music or video clips for students to use for their work and products.
Some specific issues I have run into:
1. YouTube Creative Commons forces you to use their video editor, which is a good basic editing tool, but a bit limiting for upper grade projects. (I’m also not sure on how it documents the attribution).
2. SoundCloud seems to have a lot of “not appropriate” music in their Creative Commons sections, much of which doesn’t really seem like it should be identified as Creative Commons. Only a portion of the music files even had a download button.
Some good sources for Creative Commons Media:
Creative Commons – a great resource explaining Creative Commons with a page to search CC media.
Jamendo – a good resource for CC music and audio clips
I’ve come across Videezy. It has good downloadable high quality (short) video clips.
Do any of you have other good sources for Creative Commons media (especially video) that you use with your students? I really want to find more creative commons video and music resources to use with my students, especially if they are easy to use (no sign-in, downloads straight from site).
Please share in the comments. Thanks!
