Sound Effects and Music for Multimedia Projects

Today I was watching and listening as students filmed and edited videos for spanish class.  Those that captivated me the most were ones that included music and sound effects.  It is helpful that iMovie comes with many stock audio files and that with GarageBand other music can be made.  However, below is a list of other locations you can direct your students when they are looking for a other audio files to enrich their videos. 

These suggestions come from Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers.

• Royalty Free Music hosts music tracks that can be reused in numerous ways. Royalty Free Music charges the general public for their downloads, but students and teachers can download quite a bit of the music for free. To access the free music tracks students and teachers should visit the education page on Royalty Free Music.
• Musopen's collection of free recordings contains performances of the works of more than 150 composers. You can stream the music from Musopen for free. You can also download five recordings per day for free from Musopen.
• The Internet Archive hosts an extensive collection of music and other audio recordings that you can download for free. You should point out to students that they need to look at the usage rights closely when they find things on the Internet Archive. Not everything that is available to download for free is eligible to be reused for free.
• The Free Music Archive provides free, high-quality, music in a wide range of genres. The content on Free Music Archive is used under various creative commons licenses. The New York State Music Fund provided initial funding for FMA. FMA seeks to maintain a high-quality resource through the use of selected curators who approve or deny all submissions to the collection. Anyone can download music from FMA for use in podcasts, videos, and other digital presentation formats. The music collections can be searched by genre or by curator.
• Sound Bible is a resource for finding and downloading free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites. All of the sounds on Sound Bible are either public domain or labeled with a Creative Commons license. You can find sounds for use in podcasts, videos, slideshows, or other multimedia creations.   
• The next time you need common sounds like doorbells ringing, dogs barking, or car horns honking to use in a multimedia project you could try to record those sounds yourself or you could turn to SoundGator to find free recordings that you can download. SoundGator offers free sound recording downloads. There are twenty-three recording categories that you can browse through to find the perfect sound for your project. You do have to register on SoundGator in order to download recordings. After registering you can download recordings directly to your computer to re-use in your projects.
• Freeplay Music hosts more than 15,000 music files that your students can download to use in their multimedia projects. The Freeplay Music education license allows students and teachers to use the music for free within the confines of the school. Publishing those projects on YouTube requires a slightly different though still free license. You can find the details of the licenses here.

Here is a link to an article about 25 free resources provided by Discovery Education.  These are fabulous free resources.

Google Forms gets a cool upgrade

Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for the content of this post.


Google Forms is great tool for creating and distributing all kinds of surveys and quizzes. Now you can customize the look of your Google Forms beyond the default theme choices that Google has offered for years. You can now use your images as backgrounds and headers on Google Forms. You now have more choices in your font selections too.

To customize your Google Forms click the "change theme" button while viewing a Form in the edit mode. After clicking "change theme" you can choose a new theme and customize it by selecting the "customize" button that appears just below the theme's name. See my screenshots below for visual directions.

Click image to view full size.

Click image to view full size. 

Google Drive Updates Teachers should know about

Below are four recent Google Drive updates you should know about.  Thanks to Educational Technology and Mobile Learning for the content of this post.

Google has recently released some important updates to its Google Drive. I have already covered each of these updates in separate posts but for those of you who haven't seen them yet, the list below aggregates all of these updates in one single place.

Google Docs 

1- Suggested Edits 

This new feature is great for collaborative work on Google Docs. Before, when you share a Google document with your collaborators and grant them the editing rights they can edit anything in it. But with "Suggested Edits" you, as the owner of the document, can control this editing process by allowing collaborators to make only suggestions which you can either accept or reject. This new feature is not available on Google Docs for mobile. Here is the tutorial

2-  Edit Office Files in Google Drive

Sometimes people send you files and you need to be able to open them, make some edits, and send them back. If they don’t use Docs, Sheets and Slides it can be a challenge. With the latest update from Google Drive, this is no longer an issue because both the web and mobile apps for Docs, Sheets, and Slides let you edit Office files—without conversion—so you can now edit and send back files in their original format.

Google Slides 

1- Widescreen Format

Google now allows a widescreen view of presentations. Now when you try to make a new presentation you will have a widescreen where you can get a ton of new space to fill with words, charts, tables or even a simple, beautiful image. You can also change the size of your slides using the pull down menu in the theme chooser, or by visiting Page setup in the File menu. Widescreen presentation are a good fit for TV or monitor.

2- Editable Master Slide

This functionality allows users to change customize the theme of their presentations as they like. can now easily tailor how content appears on every slide by selecting "Edit master" from the Slide menu. For example, you can set all of your header fonts to Alconica, make all of your first level bullets bold, and add a logo in the bottom right corner.

3- Edit, Crop, and Add Borders to Images in Slides

With this new feature, users can now customize and edit images they use in their Slides . Before this update, users were limited as to what they can do with images they upload to their slides,now Google makes it easier for anyone to crop, edit, apply shape masks, and add borders to their images from within the presentation.

4- Slide App is now available

Like Docs and Sheets, Google Slide has now a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Using this app, you will be able to create and edit slides on the go, even if you are offline.

Animations and Classroom Web Resources

Animations and Classroom Web Resources

Be The Beat - New with the American Heart Association is an Interactive heart and virtual CPR simulation.  Students can explore the differences between a healthy and unhealthy heart as well as to see what happens during cardiac arrest.  This would be great when you study the circulatory system.  

Medial Animations Library  - The University of Pennsylvania has an animations Library of over 200 videos.  These are defiantly worth a look before you teach your next science lesson. 

Internet4Classrooms - An organization of excellent and free online Language Arts and Math resources that can be used in the computer lab or in your classroom with your projector.  Internet4Classrooms also has some great assessment resources you should explore.  I found some percent resources that I am going to use this coming week. 

 WolframAlpha - One of Nancy's favorites, WolframApha is an excellent way to search for a quick "facts sheet" for a person or location.  A quick search of Grand Rapids pulls up population, weather, influential people, cost of living and more.  

AlphaMaps takes the power of WolframApha and Google Maps and overlays them together.  Next time you are looking for some quick fact, try WolframApha and AlphaMaps instead of or in addition to your google search.  

Three Great Resources

Hi Elementary Teachers,

Online Conference 

For those of you wishing to extend your abilities using Google Apps, there is a free online conference on May 2.  The conference runs from Noon - 10 PM and you can pick and choose which session to virtually attend.  Here is the link to the conference site.

You will need to have a personal gmail account established to fully utilize all of the online features of the conference.  Your current school account does not have all of the features of a personal account.  Need help getting set up to attend a session let me know. 

Fraction Tools

Yea another cool way to help student understand Fractions! Helping students understand fractions requires us to use models and allow students to work with models.  Often students just follow the exact steps we tell them to, but miss the conceptual understanding... plaguing them as they move on.  Well, I was really excited to find Conceptua Math Free Fraction Tools to help me show models to students and allow students to interact with the problems.  4th and 5th grade math teachers... In your unit plan for fractions write down "comceptuamath.com" "check out the laptops" to use when you teach fractions or do one of these activities the next time you go to the computer lab in the next couple weeks.  I would love to work with you and your class as you have students use one of these interactive tools!  Let's find a time to work together. :) 

Math Pickle

Explore curricular math games, puzzles and mini-competitions for the classroom.  Really cool videos and PowerPoints with ways to get your kids involved in doing math.  You will need to spend a bit of time looking around first.  Again, I would love to look around with you and find something that would work with your class.  

Is there a better way - Please Comment with your suggestions.

While reading some educational blogs this weekend, I came across a teacher discussing various instructional strategies.  He was inspired to write about these strategies because a colleague asked if he had any suggestions for teaching vocabulary to her students.  

I must admit that I can get stuck using the same teaching methods over and over.  It was good to take a look at a list of so many posible ways to spice up my teaching.  For vocabulary lessons and activities, do you notice that most times students are asked to make flash cards so they can match the definition with the word?  Remember the hundreds maybe thousands of flash cards you made for your college foreign language class.  Is there a better way?  Do student really gain an understanding of vocabulary that way?  

I ask you to join me in reviewing a list of teaching strategies.  Then respond to us all with which ones look fun...ones you might try out.  

1) Take a look at these Various Teaching Strategies:

• http://www.beesburg.com/edtools/glossary.html
• http://www.appomattox.k12.va.us/acps/attachments/6_6_12_dan_mulligan_handout.pdf
• http://www.cehd.umn.edu/nceo/presentations/NCEO-LEP-IEP-ASCDGlossary.pdf
• http://www.brainboxx.co.uk/a3_aspects/pages/T&Lactivities_VAK.htm

2) Please comment below...How do you teach vocabulary?