I said what book I was reading from etc, but I forgot as soon as I sent my words out of my classroom by embedding it into our web2.0 course’s private Gcast place (where everyone’s “assignments” had to be turned in), that made turned my “1st podcast effort/potential teaching tool” into an official “published” podcast in the laws of the copyright police-Yikes!
I was so focused on getting the whole thing done in 30 minutes I never even thought about it until I clicked on the title in Gcast to make sure it would play correctly– but as soon as I heard it, I remembered. (!)
Part of the assignment was to embed a link to my podcast on my blog which would have been another violation! And of course, it was the Final Deadline for the Course-so I had no time to lose and no time to do it until long after school got out.
To make the course deadline, I didn’t go to our first football game, but stayed in my classroom trying to figure out how to get the “mis-cast” removed from Gcast-but I failed at first, so finally I just made a “replacement podcast”– but still had to EMAIL my web 2.0 coach to tell her what I did-How embarrassing!
And even more embarrassing was I had to admit my mistake to Gcast, which has big copyright warnings right where you can’t miss them-that I barely skimmed and blew right on by!
So I begged their forgiveness (they were nice and helpful tho’ about telling me how to remove the thing, but my computer wouldn’t let me do what they said to do unless I was an “administrator”), so then I had to get friends in the It Dept at school to help me-asking via EMAIL again, which meant I got to be even more embarrassed, and freaked out because you know I respect copyright laws (I do! I really, really do!)– but no way around it. It was a few days before the problem got solved because of course being in IT those folks stayed totally and completely slammed almost every minute of the day-even worse than teachers like me.
Anyway, I thought you might want to tell your faculty this story so maybe someone will learn from all my mistakes! Now that I know my IT Dept was understanding too, and I still have my job, I feel like I can show my red face to you and the rest of the world because it isn’t so red anymore. I certainly learned my lesson quite dramatically enough for me-no copyright lawyers necessary. Just goes to show that anyone can make these copyright boo-boos-even people who care about copyright!
Guess it was a good thing though, in the end-it saved a lot of kids from being bored completely to death by my soporific treatise on Contemporary Dance! (Too bad it was a wasted effort, after to listening to it, I was sure I sold it on the Internet as a sleep aid).

I’m trying to think of a way some of your students and at least some of my 3rd grade dancers might collaborate on some kind of web 2.0 project. If you’re interested, let me know! Thanks! -Jan

I would like to know more specifics about copyright permissions and dance programs. I teach technology in a fine arts charter school and I haven’t come across any information about what sort of permissions we might need whenever we do a dance program. I’ve asked the dance teachers and they say that they don’t know of anything either. I’m not so sure though. Could you recommend some resources that I could use to teach my students who are dancers about responsibly using outside media in their work?

I’m also curious about the web2.0 class that you’ve mentioned….what is it? Where is it? Or maybe I should keep reading!

Sherill