Free Media Resources for Projects

When creating a project, such as a presentation, video, poster, podcast, or more, one challenge is finding media elements for your project that are free to use.

Thankfully there are many resources online that provide free, high-quality multimedia content that you and your students are able to use for free in any of your creations.

These include:

🖼️ Free Photos

✂️ Free Clipart and Icons

🏃 Free Animated GIFs

🅰️ Free Fonts and Text

🔊 Free Sound Effects

🎵 Free Music

▶️ Free Videos

🔱 Free Design Templates

In this blog post we will explore lists of free resources for each of these categories. If you have other sites that you use for free media, please let me know so I can add them to these lists.

And although the media elements provided through these sites are free, be sure to check for any attribution requirements to make sure you provide proper credit when using any content.

Adding Audio to Pear Deck Google Slides Activities

Pear Deck is an awesome add-on for Google Slides that allows you to add interactive elements to your slideshows.When you run the slideshow through the Pear Deck add-on the students can join the presentation with a code and follow along slide by slide. As they do, the students can respond to interactive questions including multiple choice, text response, numeric response, drawing, and drag and drop. And all of these responses are collected for you as the teacher.

Recently Pear Deck got even better with a new feature that allows you to add recorded or uploaded audio to the activity! This is especially helpful if you are running the Pear Deck activity as a student paced lesson, so the students can hear you speaking to give instructions, read content aloud, provide a personal connection, and more.

To help explain this I have recorded a short 7-minute video that covers all the steps. See below to access that.

If you would like to learn more, I recorded a free 1-hour webinar on "Remote Learning & Pear Deck" where I went over the fundamentals of Pear Deck for asynchronous learning, shared best practices, highlighted favorite features, and answered lots of questions. You can see the recorded video at:
www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/05/peardeck-webinar.html

4 Free and Easy Audio Recording Tools for Google Slides

The ability to add audio to Google Slides has been one of the most requested features for many years. Being creative, we have worked around this limitation in the past by embedding YouTube videos in Slides, or using a tool like Screencastify to record a video of the Slides while speaking. Although those workarounds still have their place, it is wonderful that we finally have the option to add audio directly to a slide!

Note: This feature is still rolling out to all Google accounts, so if you do not see it in your account yet, you should see it soon!

Being able to add audio to Google Slides can be used in so many ways in school:

• Narrating a slideshow
• Reading a story
• Making an instructional presentation
• Providing spoken feedback on writing
• Having student explain a solution
• Giving directions for a HyperSlides project
• And much more!

The only big pain point still left is the actual recording of the audio. You see, even though we can now add audio to a Google slideshow, there isn't a simple built-in recording button. Instead you need to record the audio separately with another program, then save it to Drive, and then add it to a slide.

So that brings up the big question… What are some easy ways to record audio? When using my Windows PC, I can use a free program such as Audacity, but many times our students will be using Chromebooks, so we need some web-based options. In this post we are going to take a look at four excellent, free options for recording audio right in your web browser, and how to add that audio to Google Slides.

Video Dubbing Learning Activities for Students

When I was a kid, we used to find creative ways to keep ourselves entertained. One of our favorites was the Dubbing Game. Basically we would turn on the TV, find a good show, and then turn off the volume. Then we would make up new lines for the characters on TV (bonus points for using funny voices). I am sure we thought it was much funnier than it really was.

As an adult, I have seen the same idea done on the show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” where they play the improv game called “Film Dub”. (I am sure they are much funnier than we ever were.)

Although dubbing a video can be a great source of entertainment, it actually can be very educational as well. There are quite a few learning activities for students when they take a video, remove the original audio, and add their own narration.

See the rest of the blog post below for ideas on how video dubbing can be used for student learning and creativity, and a free and simple technology tool they can use to create the dubbed videos.

8 Ambient Sound Websites to Help Students Focus

What helps you focus when reading, writing, or getting work done? Do you need a totally silent room, or does some amount of ambient noise help you? For some people, students included, having sound in the background can actually help them focus better. This could include music, nature sounds, or just white noise.

Although loud noise can be distracting, moderate-level sounds have been shown to help some people in several ways:

• One study found that natural ambient sounds can help people concentrate on what they are working on and improve their mood.
• Another study concluded that a moderate level of noise can help promote abstract thinking and higher creativity.
• Ambient sounds can also help drown out potentially distracting noises (such as office conversations, phone calls, and other noises where I work). This is something that could be very helpful for students in a busy classroom setting.

Thankfully there are many free websites that allow users to listen to a wide variety of ambient sounds, as well as create their own custom mixes. These could be used for the class as a whole, or better yet, students who benefit from ambient sounds could listen to these on earbuds plugged into their Chromebooks or other laptop. This could provide a great way for those students to focus on their reading, writing, and studying, and decrease distractions whether in a busy classroom or an active home.

See below for eight websites that provide free ambient sounds for students, as well as a description of what each site offers.