It’s been an exciting year in Shakopee Public Schools! Recently, teachers have been implementing some really exciting and engaging projects where students create digital stories such as Crash Course Videos and Podcasts to demonstrate their learning. While creating these projects, students are in desperate need of images, video footage, music, and sound effects to emulate the work of real professionals such as John and Hank Green of Crash Course Videos and Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcasts. And while it might be easy to do a quick search or try to rip videos from YouTube, we want our students to know how to create original works that can be published to the web for everyone to enjoy while respecting the rights of musicians and artists. There are tons of sites that allow you to download royalty-free music and high resolution images. Below are just a few of our favorite sites.

Music and Sound Effects

For music and sound effects, YouTube has compiled the YouTube Audio Library. You can filter their library by genre, mode, instrument, duration, and attribution. Click here for more resources.

Videos and Images

Pixabay is one of the best sources for free images and video clips to use for projects. In order to access it, students have to use the safe search Pixabay site and enter “guest” for the username and password. Click here for more resources.

If your students use iPads and want to be able to download songs or videos from any of these sites, they now can do that in Safari. Files downloaded in Safari will appear in the Files app. You can then open those downloaded files into other apps such as iMovie, Garageband, or Anchor.