From Qedoc

The articles covers reputable media repositories. It lists sources of media (e.g. images, sounds) suitable for embedding in educational resources. The most difficult part of finding suitable resources is licencing. Many people wrongly think that they can use copyrighted images. Others think that educators can always claim fair use on any image. This list serves to steer inexperienced educators towards resources which they can probably legally use.

Contents 1 List of resources which you can draw from 1.1 Most important resources 1.2 Sources which can be used for some purposes, but not all 1.3 Additional sites 2 List of resources which you should not draw from 3 See also 4 External links with further information 5 References

List of resources which you can draw from

Before adding anything to this list, please ensure that the resources are Creative Commons licenced, GFDL or public domain.

Most important resources

• Wikimedia Commons Over 2,500,000 re-usable, redistributable images, with an excellent categorisation system and very widely spread across all sorts of topics. Most images on Wikipedia are licenced under Creative Commons or GFDL. Stay clear of fair use images. Always click on an image first to find out what the applicable licence is. See also: Getting Wikimedia image licences right
• Flickr Huge, but watch the copyright issues carefully. Many images are not free-to-reuse, and others are subject to a variety of different licences. Look for Creative Commons licences. There are over 60 million Creative Commons licenced resources. Flickr has a number of drawbacks: its images are mainly photographic and often holiday snaps with rather repetitive, sentimental or artistic value, and the categorisation system leaves much to be desired. Although much larger than Wikimedia Commons, it is less useful for the educator.
• The Gutenberg project Provides full texts of books whose copyright has expired and which are therefore now in the public domain. Also has some illustrations from these books, and a good collection of public domain audio books (spoken versions of its texts). The size of the project is smaller than the above, but its quality and educational value are very high.

Sources which can be used for some purposes, but not all

• The Open University's "Open Learn Learning Space" Project. The Open University in the United Kingdom uses the CC-BY-NC-SA licence for its materials. The Open Learn project has several hundred "units" from which you can borrow text, media and teaching ideas. Don't forget that you must attribute your source (i.e. say where you got everything from). The NC-restriction means that you cannot copy materials to Wikimedia projects, but you could use these materials in your classroom or in web projects which allow the use of the NC-restriction.

Additional sites

For the most part, these are very small projects compared to the above, and much or all of their content may already have been included in Wikimedia Commons.

• CityPhotos.info: This site provides free city photos, travel tips, information and remarks about world cities. Images become public domain property upon submission.
• MyGeo Maps: Here you will find maps from the World Factbook. The maps are sorted by contintent, country and year of publication. The World Factbook is published by the CIA. Its maps are in the public domain and may be used freely by anyone at anytime without seeking permission.
• Ourmedia Learning Center: this is more a how-to site than a repository itself.
• pdphoto.org/: Thousands of royalty free pictures here. To view the photos: Click on a category, or use the search interface for keywords.
• Purdue & Japan Project Clipart For foreign language instructors. The clip art is carefully categorised and listed by the words which each picture is intended to illustrate. You can freely use these drawings without any fee as long as they are used for not-for-profit educational purposes.
• TeachPol: A collection of over 500 public domain images of American Political History.
• The open clipart library
• www.wpclipart.com: about 10,000 public domain images in categories. The owner of this site has gone to considerable length to check that the resources are genuinely public domain. (Public domain means that anyone can use images for any purpose.)
• 200 picturable words from the Wikimedia Foundation. Useful for basic language teaching.

List of resources which you should not draw from

Unfortunately there are many excellent educational resources on the web which you should not draw from. Often they may appear to be offering things you can use, but the fine print shows up restrictions on things like re-usability and redistributability. You should always look for Creative Commons licences if possible, or a very clear public domain release statement. Remember that websites change their terms from time to time.

• HippoCampus: A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). For personal use only (e.g. no redistribution) and strictly copyright.
• Teachers Domain: Offers free multimedia resources for the classroom and professional devlopment. The terms of use offer the materials for "non-commercial educational" use only, which would seem to indicate that the CC-BY-NC-SA licence is vaguely compatible, but this isn't enough: they need to release materials under a CC licence first.
• The Microsoft Clip Art library. The terms are not compatible with reuse and redistribution on the internet in any form, although you can probably use the materials in your classroom.^[1]

See also

• Finding legally licenced and reusable media resources
• Maximum size of media resources
• Media licencing
• Licencing
• How to insert an M3U playlist into a module
• Managing media resources
• Licencing pitfalls
• Getting Wikipedia image licences right
• Media resources on this site

External links with further information

• Fair use (Wikipedia)
• Creative Commons (Wikipedia)
• Gnu Free Documentation Licence (Wikipedia)
• Creative Commons website

References