As a Media Specialist in a Middle School, I wear many hats.  We’re notorious “Copyright Police.”  We are also leading the “Be Creative!” push in schools that are moving more and more toward digital content access, creation and sharing.  By using websites that have Creative Commons Licensing (and other Royalty-free sites) we can still have our students create digital content using images, audio and video files in an appropriate way.  I’ve created space on our school website that lists great websites to access content that our students use all the time for assignments.  They can go there to grab media and use it in their work.  I also spend time teaching kids how to search for Creative Commons media in Google! Both my “Creative” side and my “Police” side are happy!

Sites bookmarked on Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/rmetaj) include:

www.morguefile.com  a public image archive for “creatives by creatives”

www.purple-planet.com  donation-supported collection of royalty-free music

www.ccmixter.org  ccMixter is a collaborative community for music http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons  My favorite site for finding great images

http://commons.wikimedia.org  THE place to grab video, audio and image files

www.spinxpress.org  Another good media site that works with so many file formats