WEMTA 2008 conference

I attended the WEMTA 2008 conference in Milwaukee earlier this week on Sunday through Tuesday. Since I'm retired, I spent about 30% of my time volunteering -- worked the Golden Archer/Battle of the Books booth and helped out with the vendor exhibit theater.

My focus on Sunday and Monday was copyright. Since I update the copyright section of WEMTA's website, I wanted to keep myself up-to-date and locate useful resources. I wasn't disappointed.

Sunday's workshop, Copyright Wisdom for Music in Multimedia, was presented by Barry Britt, Soundzabound's Director of Copyright Compliance. (In case you are not familiar with Soundzabound, it is a source for royalty-free music for K-12 education for use in video projects, podcasts, powerpoint or slideshare projects, etc.) His presentation was enjoyable, easy to understand, chockful of useful information, and came to an end much too quickly. Here's a TeacherTube video with highlights of Mr. Britt's presentation.

Filtering and Intellectual Freedom Issues in K12 Schools

The WEMTA Spring Conference is quickly approaching, April 6-8. One of the presentors is asking for data to include in his session. Below is his request. Even if you're surveyed out, please take the survey, so we can all begin the discussion with some facts.

Hello,

For the upcoming WEMTA Conference, I am planning to present on the topic of filtering in schools. With CIPA, most of us have stopped the discussion about whether or not we should filter Internet access, and now most of the issues revolve around how we implement filters and how we deal with disagreements about what is and what is not filtered.

I would very much appreciate your feedback about how filtering decisions are made in your schools. This survey is 21 questions long, and will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete.

The results will be shared at the WEMTA Conference at the session titled: Filtering and Intellectual Freedom Issues in K12 Schools.

I will also post the responses back to the WEMTA and WETECH listservs.

While identification information is requested at the front of the survey, I will remove that information from the results.

Please take the time to either fill this survey out, or pass it on to someone in your district who is close to the decision making process for filtering. This information will serve to help schools have discussions around this important topic.

Thanks in advance,

Joel VerDuin
Director of Technology and Media Services
Wausau School District, WI

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