Students often need some background music or sound effects to use in their animation projects or podcasts.
Whilst many of them are perfectly happy to rip music from any source they can find regardless of copyright restrictions, we as teachers, should be guiding them to look for copyright free or creative commons sound tracks.
Here is a handy list of websites that publish Creative Commons audio (not in any particular order):
Music and backing tracks
Sound Effects
All students need to learn about what copyright is, why it is important and how they should abide by the legislation.
This can be a pretty dry subject to try to teach in the classroom so this fantastic film on YouTube could be used to help introduce the subject in a way that will engage most students – especially the younger ones. It takes many individual clips from Disney films and pieces them together to explain the subject of copyright.
You will need access to YouTube in the classroom or a method of showing the film offline.
If I am being very purist then I suppose I should ask the question about why a film all about copyright makes use of so many copyrighted Disney clips in order to tell the story.
YouTube has decided to stand by its sudden and unexpected decision to remove access to all premium music videos in the UK.
This will be a blow to many of us, especially our students, who have probably spent many happy hours trawling through the thousands of music videos from established and up-and-coming stars.
Suggestions for use in class (subscription only)
Pirate Bay is a world-famous website which provides links through which its users can access and download copryight material such as films, tv shows and music.
Major firms such as Sony and Warner Bros are determined to have the site shut down and have taken the owners of Pirate Bay to court. The owners say they are doing nothing wrong and claim that the site is 100% legal.
Questions for students (subscription only)