Citation and Evaluating Resources Guide: Tools to Help

Wikimedia Commons gives you access to a vast amount of images, sound clips and videos that are free and usable. It also provides you with all of the information you required to properly cite the media.

Photos for Class is a search engine that filters search results to provide you with images that are age appropriate and are labelled as free for public use as per their Creative Commons license. It also provides you with the complete citation information you need to properly cite the image.

Looking for music to create a soundtrack for a media assignment? While it may be tempting to use your favourite song, you can't use most songs without purchasing rights to the song. Bensound provides a wide range of royalty free music that works well for a variety of different purposes. People are welcome to use the music for free so long as proper acknowledgement is given to Bensound in the citations for your piece.

In an effort to combat people using copyrighted audio files and sound clips in their Youtube videos, Youtube has complied a collection of songs and sound effects that are free to use in your video projects.

PacDv has a huge collection of free sound effects to cover all your video sound effects needs. They are free to use, but PacDv does request that you credit them in the citations for your work.

Videvo is a collection of free stock videos and motion graphics for use in your projects. Most of the videos and graphics do not require you to credit the source. Some, however, ask that you do credit the source, so make sure you look out for this when you are choosing videos to use.

This sheet can help you gather your notes and citations for your research assignment.

Looking for an example of effective research notes? Here is a full sentence example.

Here is another example using point form notes.

Cite This for Me is a free citation generator. It provides the most up to date citation guides and will help guide you in the creation of your citations. Like any free online citation tool, it is not perfect, so please look closely at the citations generated to ensure there are no missing elements.

This website is a media bias fact checking website that will fact check media sources including news apps and extensions. This site has an excellent reputation for accurate and unbiased fact checking.

Politifact is a fact checking website that focuses on checking political facts and claims. This website only focuses on American politics. This fact checker has a reputation for being non-partisan and unbiased.

Like its counterpoint Politifact, Politifact Global is a non-partisan fact checking website that focuses on claims made in global politics. If you are looking to fact check political claims outside of the American sphere, this is an excellent resource.

Snopes started out as a website to fact-check urban legends and this is still a feature of this website. Over the years, however, it has evolved to focus on political claims and news sources. It has been accused of being liberal in bias, but many other fact checking sites have analyzed it to be a good source of largely unbiased fact checking.

Factcheck.org is a fact checking website that has a reputation for maintaining a high level or journalistic rigour and for being unbiased in its checking. Facebook recently hired Factcheck.org to help combat viral fake news on their platform. Factcheck.org is a non-profit organization run by the University of Pennsylvania, which means it is solely focused on education and not on profit.

SciCheck is a subpage of FactCheck. It focuses on false or misleading scientific claims that have been made to influence public policy. While it largely focuses on the United States, it does have some international content.

While this source is not a fact checking source, it does curate information on current events from the left, right and centre. This allows you to see the different perspectives on a topic and make an informed decision.

This independent, non-partisan journalism site won a Pulitzer Prize for balanced journalism. While not a fact checking site, it does offer a balanced reporting on current events.