Wellcome Images

2000 Years of Human Culture

Wellcome Library, London

Wellcome Images is a “free for education” library of remarkable life images (drawings, paintings, photographs). You’ll find a range of interesting images, everything from cellular photographs (micrographs) to historical artifacts to contemporary portraits. A search function and thematic grouping provide easy access to thousands of images.

Images are available under a liberal Creative Commons licence. This means that we can use them for educational purposes with attribution. Simply include a credit line with the copyright holder’s name.  Here is the part of the license agreement that pertains to teachers working on materials development for class:

All images with the credit line Wellcome Library, London are also available free of reproduction licence fees for the following uses: …
reproduction in teaching materials created in any medium by a teacher or lecturer at an educational establishment for the purposes of teaching. This includes making printed copies of such materials for students and promoting and making such teaching materials available in electronic form, for example, via a virtual learning environment.

TED Talks

TED (http://www.ted.com) – Ideas worth spreading

TED is a great source for free videos of idea people sharing their extraordinary ideas at the annual TED conference. TED speakers are challenged to give the talk of their life in 18 minutes or less.

For advice on using them with your class, have a look at The Best ESL Teacher Resource for “TED Talks” by Larry Ferlazzo.

Free Tunes (Creative Commons Music)

Creative Commons (free licences promoting sharing) lists a bunch of music sites under the heading “Legal Music For Videos“. If you need a song for a photostory or video project, the first two are pretty good. The others weren’t as easy to use, but might be worth a look if these don’t work for you.

Jamendo is nicely divided into genres using tags. You can limit your search by country too. Lots of great tunes from all over the world available without need to sign up. Nice.

ccMixter has remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons. You can remix the samples or create mash-ups from song samples. For example, you can download the acoustic guitar track from a song and you’ll hear only the guitar. Or, you could mash-up all the tracks except the vocals to create an instrumental version of a song. Fun but way too easy to get sucked in if all you need is a song for your student’s photostory.