Audio, video, books, music….  This is a huge topic.  The distribution of music, books, audio recordings and videos has changed drastically through the years.  In fact, the current trend in digital downloads has truly altered the publishing and recording industries.  We now can download instantly just about anything we want to see or hear.  There are services which offer free content and many which offer items for purchase.  You can watch tv or a movie online.  Ipods and other portable devices can take books, videos, audio and image downloads as well as regular feeds.

When you hear video and online mentioned in the same sentence, you probably think You Tube right away.  That is the place to go to watch short videos (from 1 to 10 minutes usually) on just about anything that interests you.  You will find instructional videos, inspirational, how-tos, historical, and entertaining topics.  Beware that you will find a wide range of quality and appropriateness on YouTube.  Some are just plain hilarious while some are just bad!  You may not realize, though, that there is a “channel” just for education – called TeacherTube.  GodTube is very similar to YouTube, but videos there feature religious content.  GoogleVideo is not on the scale of those listed, but does include video.

Online book access connects you to downloads (both free and for purchase) of audio books AND eBooks.  An audio book is one you listen to through your computer, iphone, PDA, or MP3 player, while an eBook is a digital copy of a print book – you can read it in a device called an eReader or on a PDA or computer.  Libraries are using this trend to provide innovative book lending service – lending access to an audio book download through the library’s checkout system.  Initiatives such as the Project Gutenberg are working toward digitizing all print books.

Besides downloading any of these materials for your own use, you can also upload the same to the web for sharing.  Picture sharing sites are particularly popular. Sites such as Flickr
(www.flickr.com ) provide feeds that constant send a stream of pictures to you.  Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com ), Snapfish (http://www.snapfish.com/ ), Walgreens (http://photo.walgreens.com/ )  and other photo storing and processing sites offer many options for sharing your pictures with friends and family as well as transfer files to the service for printing in a variety of formats. Video sharing sites include YouTube, TeacherTube, and GodTube.  Many of our students regularly upload video content to YouTube.  Digital cameras now commonly have a YouTube mode just for taking video to upload. 

Share slides sites such as SlideShare, SlideBoom, or author STREAM provide venues for you to publish to the web lessons that you have created and would like to share.

With online transfer and access to digital files more issues have arisen concerning Digital Rights Management.  Once a picture, video, music file, audio recording or a print file has been posted, who owns it? The whole royalty system has been shaken up.  The recording industry in particular has been forced to make major adjustments to their previous methods.  The sale of traditional album sales on CD has dropped, while digital download of single songs in addition to entire albums has sharply risen.  Instead of a recording artist having a gold album reflecting the number of album sales, now there is an award for the number of digital downloads. 

What do you need to retrieve those files?  There are many video capture tools and converters available, both free and for purchase.  Consider the format of the video you want to capture – do you have a player or viewer that works with that format?  If not you will need to either convert the file, or download the right player.

Tool to download videos from any video sharing site  
ClipNabber  (http://clipnabber.com/) YouTube
(www.youtube.com ), Metacafe (http://www.metacafe.com/),  TeacherTube
(www.teachertube.com )etc.)
Tool to share pictures:  Flickr (www.flickr.com )