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Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons Search Function - With one click lets you search Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Blip.tv and more for CC licensed material (uses tabs to let you explore).

Sound Effects

The FreeSound Project - Great range of samples, all licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling license.
Also, with various sound effects, and archives of differing sizes: Sound Bible; FreeSFX.

Music and Songs

Open Music Search - A customised Google search which hunts through most sources of open music and sounds.
PodSafe Audio - Songs, by genre or artist, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.
OpSound - Songs, scores and samples under different Creative Commons licenses.
DigCCMixter & ccMixter - Songs, licensed using different Creative Commons types, featuring one or more samples of previous work (all legally sampled).
Jamendo - songs under various CC licenses; easy to download (no sign-up required).
The Free Music Archive - "an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet."
Also, for all sorts of audio, see the main Creative Commons Audio page for new and exciting sounds and music.

Images

Royalty free images: Unsplash; Pexels; Pixabay; StockSnap. (Remember, as part of your assignment you need to give individual credit for each image and creator, even if that's not a legal requirement.)
It is now possible to search for Creative Commons licensed images using Google Image's Advanced Search function.
Flickr's Creative Commons Pool. (Flickr is the world's largest photo-sharing website; some of the photos are licensed under Creative Commons licenses and can be re-used depending on the terms of that license; not all are legally reusuable, so make sure you check the licenses if you find Flickr images in a different way that coming in through the CC Pool page. Also, keepin in mind that some Creative Commons licenses give you permission to mix and edit, some don't, so you need to read each license, or limit your search to definitely reusably image - anything marked as Attribution Only is perfect for you!) Three very easy to use tools for finding images and photos under particular Creative Commons licenses are FlickrCC, CompFight and PictureSandbox. These tools are generally easier to use than Flickr's own search function. Also, if you're after just the high-quality CC-licensed photos on Flickr, then Behold is the tool for you (this is especially useful if you're preparing print-quality work). You can use Multicolr to find Creative Commons licensed images with specific colours (rather than tags, etc.). The Flickrleech tool is a great way to search for CC images on Flickr in bulk, but keep in mind you have to use advanced search settings, it doesn't limit results to CC images by default; FlickrStorm works in a similar way, so make sure you click 'advanced' to limit your results to CC.
Picasa Web - It is now possible to limit searches on Google's Picasa image service to return CC results.
OpenPhoto - Stock images, most of which are legally reusable (details about the various licenses are here).
Stock.xchng - A good collection of legally reusable images, all of which can be used for educational purposes (and if you're using images beyond that context, make sure you read their license agreement).
For a fantastic list of free stock photos, some of which are a bit more obscure, see Laura Milligan's '100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images'.
For icons (small images) and graphics for the web, Iconspedia is a great source. Almost all content is free to re-use, but each icon set has its own terms of use, so check the licenses when downloading.

Video

The Internet Archive's Moving Image Section: This is the main directory for all of the open-access video stored in the Internet Archive.
Blip.TV: blip.tv allows users to explicitly license their content (unlike, for example, YouTube). As such, many clips are legally reusuable depending on the license on each individual clip.
OurMedia Video: OurMedia is a community-driven website with many, many different types of media which are, for the most part, Creative Commons licensed. The video section is great, but there are also audio
Lum Skop: Motion graphics and animation available under Creative Commons lincensing, including High Definition (1920x1080) formats.
Public Domain Torrents: Bittorrent files of feature-length films which are now in the public domain. (Obviously these are large files and you need a bittorrent client to download them).
EMOL Free Movie List: Also public domain films and television, considerable cross-over with other sites, but with direct-downloads rather than bittorrent files. Also, can be viewed by genre.
US National Archives Video (hosted by Google): Historical footage, US-government made advertising and (the best bit) archive footage from NASA.
BBC's Virtual Revolution Rush Footage: As an experiment in crowd interaction, the BBC released the raw, but high-quality (1280x720), footage of the various interviews, location shots and infographics from their documentary series about the world wide web, The Virtual Revolution (aired in the UK, February 2010. There are lots of great interviews with everyone from Tim Berners-Lee to Mark Zuckerberg and the footage is licensed under the BBC's equivalent of an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.
Wikimedia Commons Videos: A decent archive, sorted by categories, but the videos are in OGG format and either need a specific codec or transcoded for use in most media players and editors.

Please note, most of the video archives have a mix of public domain, Creative Commons (and other copyleft) and material under traditional copyright. You MUST check the licensing on every video clip you use, and keep 100% accurate records of the source and copyright status of each clip. Your best advice is to keep in mind this tip from the Internet Archive:

"Who owns the rights to these movies?

This will vary for practically every movie in the archive. We are endevouring to make it easy to understand what you can do with these movies, but this is a work-in-progress. Many of the movies and collections are licensed with Creative Commons Licenses. If the movie has a CC License, it will be noted on the movie's detail page. Click on this link to find out exactly what the permissions are for that particular film. Some films may have the contact information listed for the filmmaker. If the information is provided, feel free to contact the filmaker or organization the film comes from. If there's no license, you should assume that the only thing you're allowed to do with it is watch it."

How to License and Mark Your Material

Molly Kleinman has done two straight-forward explanations on how to go about using licenses that require Attribution or need to be used Non-Commercially.
Beyond simple text, there are some good pre-prepared images to allow you to mark your own work if you choose a Creative Commons license. The general page on marking is here, which links to pages for specific media types, such as this page for marking video.