Teach Students to Add the Power of Music to Their Projects
Using music in projects is an important skill for students to develop. Music and sound ef-
fects can make or break a presentation
and can take a good project to a whole
new level. Sir Alan Parker, director
of the films Birdy, Evita, Fame, Pink
Floyd: The Wall, and many others,
said:
When music and images gel,
they can take the audience’s brains
to another plane emotionally
and dramatically. Bad film music
intrudes without complementing
the action. A great score gets un-
der your skin, triggers your sub-
conscious, enhances the drama,
and helps drive the emotional
power train of the movie.
Teaching students how to include
music in their projects also allows
you an opportunity to teach valuable
digital citizenship skills they’ll need to
be able to find royalty-free music and
understand the reason why that’s important. If they simply import songs
from their i Tunes libraries, chances
are it is not permissible to use them
under Creative Commons licensing.
If students post videos on You Tube or
Vimeo that contain copyrighted songs,
the audio will likely be stripped, and
their accounts may be suspended.
Hundreds of sites offer music to
download, but the majority of these
are pay based and/or not very user
friendly. Below are three great, easy-to-use sites for students to find no-cost, royalty-free music and sound
effects to use in their projects.
Purple Planet Royalty-Free Music. This
is a good source for fun, easy-to-use,
royalty-free music for projects. All the
music on the site is free to download
and is composed and performed by
Geoff Harvey and Chris Martyn. A
link back to the site is all you need to
use any of the many songs within the
site. Three things I really like about
this site are:
• There is a nice mouse-over audio
preview feature that allows students
