Recently, it seems that quite a few teachers want to have their students use popular music for class assignments. In the past, students would create a "mixtape" on an analog cassette (back in the day) or, more recently, they would burn a CD of songs, which would leave the teacher with a stack of media that might never be used again. What a waste.

More recently, the challenge that teachers and tech staff encounter is that either students want to take tracks from their iPods or CDs and put them on the Web. Obviously, this is fraught with all kinds of technological and copyright-related issues. Well, here's a possible solution, as described in depth by Wired magazine.

MixTape.me is a website that acts like an online version of iTunes, without the need to purchase anything. Students (and teachers) can search for many popular songs and then create their own playlist(s) to share with others. Below is an example, which I was able to create and embed in this blog in under 5 minutes. Think then of the possibilities: students could create a custom playlist and then add their own comments, as well as pictures to the "jukebox". HINT: just double-click on a song title to play the music!

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For those of you who attended my talk on designing more effective PowerPoint presentations, here is a copy of the slides, recently featured on the homepage of SlideShare.net:

"You are a Presentation SuperStar on SlideShare!

Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday."

I've also included (below) many links to the sites mentioned during the session:

If you happened to attend the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference on Thursday, or could not attend, here is an online version of my presentation on educational blogging:

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Image via Wikipedia

For those of you that attended my recent session on "Copyright and Fair Use for Educators and their Students", the appeal to the Librarian of Congress is due on Monday, February 2nd at 5 pm EST. Remember, if successful, it will create an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for educators using "ripped" DVD clips to teach media literacy.

• Concrete examples from your own work showing how the inability to lawfully circumvent the technological access controls on DVDs has created educational hardships or interfered with your teaching goals,
• Explanation of how the proposed exemption would help you and your students
• Information about school and other institutional policies that prohibit the circumvention of DVD copy-protection technology; and
• Your own beliefs about why media literacy and digital media in education is such an essential part of our students’ future.

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When the financial crisis first hit, I found myself grappling as much as my students were with the complexities of our economic system. Though I am a homeowner and realized that many of the problems stemmed from so-called "mortgage-backed securities", I honestly could not figure out my own place in this meltdown.

That was until I heard the economic terms contextualized in narrative form on a public radio program, This American Life, entitled, "The Giant Pool of Money". I'm sure some of it is oversimplified, but what I enjoyed about the show (in free podcast form) was that the hosts never took for granted that the audience understood what those "creative" financial instruments like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) were!

Knowing that my American Studies students could benefit from this explanation in the midst of a unit called "Stories and Histories", my teaching partner, John O'Connor, and I designed an activity which harnessed the power of our 42 students to our collective advantage.

We assigned each student a portion of the radio transcript to visually represent as a single slide. In order to make this a truly collaborative effort, we dropped the students into 2 adjacent computer labs, and had them all simultaneously edit a shared presentation via Google Docs.

It was an amazing endeavor to observe, as students got up from their computer terminals in order to negotiate with their peers the transitions and shared metaphors from slide to slide. Check it out:

In terms of copyright and fair use considerations, each student was required to cite and link back to every image they re-purposed in the shared presentation. Once the project was completed by the students, I organized the slides and then matched it to the original radio audio on another website, SlideShare.

I wanted to model permission-seeking to my students by making a formal request to National Public Radio. Unfortunately, after a few friendly emails back and forth, This American Life refused my request. Therefore what you see above is somewhat limited in that it lacks the soundtrack. I'm still pursuing other avenues as I post this. What do you think? Was our class project an example of "fair use" or did we take it too far by wanting to share it with a wider audience?

UPDATE (5/22/09): I've decided that I will publish the completed presentation on the web after all. After a school year of sharing this project with private audiences, I posted my dilemma to a wiki dedicated to ending copyright confusion. Here is a portion of the response I received from Renee Hobbs of Temple University:

What a creative way to incorporate media literacy into the social studies curriculum! As I look at the piece, it seems that your students have demonstrated their understanding of the content by transforming the "This American Life" segment into a new work through their imaginative multimedia slides. The educational value of this assignment is based, in fact, on the careful relationship between the audio and the images....[W]here you have asked permission and been refused, your decision about distribution rests completely on your comfort level about whether this use indeed a fair use....I think it's a great example of how, sometimes, we use a whole piece of media in our work with students -- and for the specific learning objective, we need to use the whole piece.

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