Here’s a great list of royalty free music, sounds and images by Mathew Needleman. Mathew is a Los Angeles area educator who teaches video techniques, so this list is right on target for K-12 use.
Bonus! Check out Mathew’s session for the K12Online Conference, Film School for Video Podcasters.
Superbonus! Mathew’s site for Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom.
Sylvia
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Maybe I’m a stick in the mud, but I think you need to point out that teachers (and everyone) need to know that for every single piece of media they use, they must make sure that whoever owns the rights for that media allows the teacher to use it, and under what circumstances. For example, teachers should find the license information on each of these sites before downloading and using the media.
Yes, this is obvious. Yes, it should be common knowledge.
However, nearly every educator I’ve talked to has assumed they are exempt from the rules of everyone else and that Fair Use gives educators the rights to use and abuse whatever media they want to. The few who realize that they can’t just use everything think that anything labeled “Royalty-Free” can be used and abused.
People, including teachers, who use CC-BY licensed work without giving attribution are definitely discouraging more content creators from releasing their work under CC and similar licenses.
Right Dave, in fact “royalty free” doesn’t mean FREE at all .. in fact, it means that once a licensee pays for the rights to a piece of audio, music or sound effect, they are able to use the track in productions without any further royalty free payments.
Using royalty free tracks without paying for the license is illegal. On the other hand, there are free sites in the traditional sense like http://www.freesoundeffectsandloops.com for example that just give away free sfx and music loops … their terms, however, state that the samples are free for personal use, not commercial … always read the fine print … and always think logically, why would musicians and sound designers simply give away their hard work for free? are they really doing that? in most cases, they aren’t