These Old Commercials are Grrreat!
The Internet Archive is a great place to find all kinds of old media that is either in the public domain or is available for use through Creative Commons licensing. For example, I recently shared a collection of thousands of LEGO guides available on the Internet Archive. Another example that I’ve recently discovered is a […]
Need LEGO Ideas? Take a Look at This!
Making things with LEGOs is one of my favorite indoor activities to do with my daughters. We’ve spent many rainy days building all kinds of things LEGOs. Often we follow the directions from a guidebook and sometimes we just make our own things. Every once in a while they ask for another LEGO guidebook. I’m […]
Swords, Airplanes, and Cartoons – A Big Collection of Free Sound Effects
The Internet Archive’s USC Optical Sound Effects Library is a collection of hundreds of sound effect recordings created for Hollywood studios in the beginning in the 1930’s through the 1980’s. The recordings were donated to USC and have now been digitized for playback and download on the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive’s USC Optical Sound […]
More Than 100,000 Historic Maps for Classroom Use
Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Source 1. Source 2. In this week’s Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I mentioned that digital mapping tools is one of the areas of educational technology that I’m still passionate about after sixteen years and 17,000 blog posts. And making comparisons through the use of […]
A Short Overview of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – And How I Use It
The Internet Archive can be a great place to find all kinds of old videos, audio recordings (there’s a huge collection of Grateful Dead show recordings), pictures, and books. The Internet Archive also offers a tool called the Wayback Machine that you can use to see what a website looked like on a previous date. […]
Internet Archive Scholar – An Academic Version of the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time […]
Two Ways to Find Free Ebooks to Download
Every day I’m hearing from teachers who can’t get back into their classrooms because their school buildings are completely closed. My own school building has very limited access and only by administrative approval right now. These kind of closures have left some teachers searching for online alternatives to the books, particularly free reading time books, […]
How to Find, Download, and Borrow Books from the Internet Archive
On Tuesday hundreds of thousands of works entered the public domain. That includes early movies, pictures, early audio recordings, and many pieces of literature. Many of those works are available through the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive offers millions of texts that can be borrowed and or downloaded for free. In the following video I […]
The Free Music Archive is Closing – But Not All is Lost
For the better part of the last decade the Free Music Archive has been one of my go-to places to find free music to use video projects. Unfortunately, the end is near for the Free Music Archive. Earlier this month the hosts of the FMA announced that it would be shutting down at the end […]
Here’s the Way That I Recommend Using the Internet Archive
In last night’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter I mentioned using the Internet Archive as a source of public domain video clips to re-use in classroom video projects. That suggestion drew a lot of emails from readers this morning. Most of the emails expressed concern about the content that students can find […]
Borrow, Read, and Listen – The Open Library
The Open Library is a part of the Internet Archive. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online, downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader […]
25,000 78 RPM Records for Your Listening Pleasure
A few years ago I spent time preparing my grandparents’ home to be sold. In the process my uncles and I came across many artifacts of a bygone era in American culture. Included in those artifacts were some 78RPM records. Unfortunately, lacking a record player we weren’t able to play the records. But today there […]
The Wayback Machine – Take a Look at the Evolution of the Web
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is one of the resources that I have included in my presentation about search strategies and fake news. I include it because it is a tool that can be used to see how a website or a specific webpage has changed over time. As is demonstrated in my video embedded […]
Lantern – Search Thousands of Media History Documents
The Media History Digital Library is a massive archive of books and magazines about the history film, television, and radio. The Lantern is the name of the search engine that lets you search through more than 2,000,000 pages of scanned copies of the books and magazines in the MHDL. In those books and magazines you will find reviews […]