(image via Wikipedia)

At last week’s final Cohort 21 Face to Face session, I chatted with Bart and Erin about our action plan journeys.  We touched on a number of challenges we had each come up against, namely that “tech” (ok that’s a bit of an all-encompassing term but we were all talking about slightly different aspects – social media, use of computers/ iPads in the classroom, computer science as a subject) gets a bit of a bad rap from parents and colleagues. Too often, only the negative side of using tech (too much screen time! online bullying!) is talked about with not enough emphasis on the positives. I mentioned that I have been fortunate to have had the example of my own personal blog and social media presence which have afforded me amazing opportunities over the past five years. I would like to think that my little corner of the world wide web shows a little bit of what’s possible and some of the good that can come from being “tech-savvy” for want of a better word.

This week, I had the chance to “see” my Cohort 21 Action Plan spring into action, so to speak 😉 when two separate but connected incidents reminded me why I started this journey in the first place…

It just so happens I was responding to a comment on one of my YouTube videos the other evening when I noticed that YouTube had flagged it “Matched Third Party Content“. When I made the video, I was bored with the iLife/ iMovie music and searched the internet for some royalty free tunes I could use, and found this “Fig Leaf Rag” on Incompetech, which is a site providing royalty-free music as long as it is correctly attributed.  I did the correct thing and attributed the music as per the instructions at the end of the video which you can see here:

[youtube width=”560″ height=”315″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ASgbxszTKw[/youtube]

But because it’s a royalty-free version of a well-known tune, the YouTube bots have scanned it and found it to be third-party content because the bots don’t read, they just listen. I’ve filed a dispute (I have had to do this before with a tune from the iLife suite!) but I think it will all be ok.

Yesterday I was walking by one of the classrooms where a few students were working on a video for their “Take me Outside” project. Right at the end of the video there was some music that one of them had imported from their iTunes – perhaps not more than fair use allows (though there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule – I’ve heard 6 seconds is ok, I’ve also read 30 seconds is ok) but in any case, when questioned about this the boys thought that because they had paid for the song on iTunes, they were allowed to use it in their video. I asked them where the video was going to be posted and they told me it was going to YouTube so I cautioned them about the bots what would scan their video and might flag it as matching third party content. Showing them the example from my own video was so helpful – I showed them where I found the music, how I attributed it correctly and explained that YouTube doesn’t read or watch the videos – they just listed to the music to see if it might be third party content.  The boys (and their teacher) were not aware of this – so I showed them a few sites to look for other music (and how to attribute it) but also pointed them in the safe direction of the iLife/ iMovie music available on iMovie.  What a perfect teachable moment!