Media Search Tools

Google Image Search

Google Images has indexed millions of images on the Internet. Odds are you can find an image for just about any topic here.

Bing and Yahoo can also do image searches.

Bing Video Search

Bing has gotten high marks for its video search feature. Google and Yahoo also do video searches.

Most of the results are YouTube videos. If you are not finding what you want with one search site, try a different one.

FindSounds

FindSounds.com is a specialized search engine for finding sound effects on the Web. Search for "frog" and get a nice ribbit.

You can use these sounds in your next school production, or to liven up a Power Point presentation.

Freesound

Freesound is a good place to search for sound files. It's goal is to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... all released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.

Exploratorium Videos

The Exploratorium in San Francisco has a wide variety of videos, podcasts and slide shows that can be searched using this link.

Baidu Image Search

Baidu – China's version of Google – provides image search. While the site is in Chinese, it will easily process English search terms.

FreePD - Public Domain Music

While not a search engine, FreePD provides a wide variety of music tracks indexed by genre. They are all licensed under Creative Commons 0 ("No Rights Reserved") and can be freely used in school projects and videos.

Creative Commons Image Search

Creative Commons (CC) Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. CC Search indexes more than 300 million images, aggregating results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog.

Currently CC Search only indexes images, but they plan to add additional media types such as open texts and audio. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, allowing creators to share knowledge and creativity online.