Getting Started

There are many places to find openly licensed authentic resources (e.g., culturally relevant photographs and target language music), as well as openly licensed teacher-authored pedagogical resources (e.g., lessons, syllabi, and curricula). To get started, try following our instructions for filtering a Google search to find Creative Commons licensed authentic resources from repositories and websites across the internet.

Once you get more familiar with searching for openly licensed materials, there are many more sites you can go to. We describe them on the next page.

 

How to search for OER

1. Go to Google Advanced Search at https://www.google.com/advanced_search Links to an external site.. 
2. In the top field titled "all these words", enter your keyword or phrase.
3. At the very bottom of the search options, you’ll see a field labeled “Usage rights”. That is where you will filter by license. The dropdown lists different license permissions with varying degrees of openness. Choose the permissions you want for the material you are searching. We recommend “free to use, share or modify, even commercially”, which will give the most open materials licensed under a CC BY license.
4. Click the “Advanced Search” button. Once your search finishes, it will be easier to filter out Images, Videos, News, Books, and More from the top menu.
5. When you click on one of your results, make sure to look for the license on the content before using it.
6. Evaluate the resource and try it out with your students. There is more information about this on the following pages.

 

Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons Search Links to an external site. is a search tool maintained by the Creative Commons organization. This is a simple user interface but the recently released new version only allows users to search for images. In the future, it should allow users to search for other kinds of media.

 

 

 

Go to the next page to learn more about finding OER.