Who doesn’t like free stuff? But in the field of education finding free materials that fulfill your needs often proves difficult. In this blog post, I have annotated a short list of websites that provide free resources that can be used by anyone (instructional designer, teacher or student) and for any purpose from a personal or professional website to a multimedia presentation to an online course or assignment.

Pixabay
What is great about Pixabay is that not only can you use these images, but you can modify them to suit your needs and even use them for commercial purposes without having to pay any fees. Nearly all are free of copyrights, which means attribution is NOT required…so no need to worry about citing sources here.

Freesound & SoundBible
These sound effects sites are “open source” which simply means everyone can create and share. Great for teachers providing feedback for students or for anyone to use for creative purposes. For these sites please check the “terms of use” as some require attributions or have restrictions on use.

H5P
This open-source authoring tool site can be used to create multimedia presentations or activities and games that involve drag and drops, hot spots, fill-in-the blanks, etc. To create content all you need to do is register with the site (which is free) and either install the web plugin or embed the content on your site.

Let’s keep this list going…For this I encourage you to post a blog comment listing any free resources (images, videos, sound effects, games, tools, etc.) that you have found. Let’s see how many OERs we can collect and share here with the OSU CDT blog community.

Happy hunting!