A Short Guide to Finding and Using Media on Your Blog - Part 2

In part one of this series I shared some ideas for creating a gallery of media to use in your classroom blog posts. If you don't have the time or opportunity to create your own media for blog posts then you should look for media that is in the public domain.

Public Domain works are images, writings, videos, and sounds whose copyright has expired or never had a copyright attached to them. Public Domain Sherpa offers a handy little calculator that helps you determine if a work is in the public domain.

Places to find public domain media:
Pixabay is a good place to find and download quality public domain images. You can search on Pixabay by using keywords or you can simply browse through the library of images. When you find an image you can download it in the size that suits your needs. Registered users do not have to enter a captcha code to download images. Users who do not register can download images, but they do have to enter a captcha code before downloading each picture.

The Internet Archive is a great place to find images, videos, audio recordings, and texts that are in the Public Domain. While most of the works are in the Public Domain not all of them are so make sure you check the license attached to each artifact.

The Commons on Flickr is a good resource for students in need of images for multimedia projects for history, literature, and other content areas. A requirement of contributors to The Commons is that all images are made available without copyright restrictions.

The Digital Comic Museum is a crowd-sourced collection of hundreds of classic comic books that are now in the public domain. Register users can download these comics from the site. You can browse the galleries to find comics to download. If know the name of a comic or comic publisher you can search for it by name.

The National Jukebox is an archive of more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. These are recordings that were made using an acoustical recording process that captured sounds on wax cylinders. The recordings in the archive can be searched and listened to on your computer. You can search the archives by recording date, recording type, language, and target audience. The National Jukebox has also arranged playlists that you can listen to in a continuous stream. You can also embed the recordings player into your blog or website.

Sound Bible is a resource for finding and downloading free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites. Nearly all of the sounds on Sound Bible are either public domain or labeled with a Creative Commons license. On Sound Bible you will find sounds for use in blog posts, podcasts, videos, slideshows, or other multimedia creations.

Click here for part three.