Podcasting Part 2

This week we spent most of class working on our group Podcasts. Since the recording took longer than expected, class was mostly dedicated to this and we will continue with the rest of the planned lesson next week. So, there weren't the same 3 types of big ideas this week as usual, but I would say that I came away with a few big thoughts. My group is working on a podcast on fire safety.
Audacity is a little bit complicated to use sometimes, as we saw when we tried to line up all of our wav files. We noticed that when we tried to line up the various wav files, we had to listen to the full sound all together to move them around more than we thought we would have to. We worked to overlap some of the files more than others to have a more smooth transitioning sound file.
Everything seemed to go really smoothly with our script writing and even recording the script, however we did run across some problems when it came time to put everything together. Somehow, everything sounded great as we played our file back in Audacity and we were feeling confident that our podcast was well on its way to being finished, but when we exported it and listened to it elsewhere, the beginning part of our podcast repeated itself, looping back over and over again. This was very frustrating and we could not figure out what had happened to cause this repetition. We found that technology can cause some problems and frustrations in this lesson.
A third thing that came up while we worked, was the concept of Fair Use. Luckily, we have already discussed this concept in class, but we did have some questions about our song use. We wanted to use a theme song from a tv show, but realized that the whole theme, while under 30 seconds, is copyrighted, so we had to make some adjustments.

These ideas can be used in our classrooms, or should at least be considered. We do need to be very careful about Fair Use laws with our students if we have them creating podcasts and finding music/sound effects to go along with the podcast. Even thinking that we were clear on the rules, we found that we were not quite sure about some things. This is a concept/rule that we should review again as teachers and relay carefully to our students.
We also need to keep in mind that technology can cause some issues and frustrations, as we saw in our group. As teachers, we will need to be very knowledgable about these possible issues and how to troubleshoot them. We will also need to watch students carefully for frustration levels and help out when needed.

The question I still have refers back to our repeating loop problem of our sound file. I don't know if this was just a kink that we somehow created or if this happens often with Audacity, but I am wondering what causes it and if there is a better way to fix it than reseting the whole podcast, as we did.