This page is for the grown-ups: what Magic of the Mouse Radio is, who makes it, how student safety and privacy are handled, what students are learning, and how any teacher is welcome to use the station in a classroom.
What the station is
Magic of the Mouse Radio is a free, family-friendly internet radio station that plays Disney music twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It is the student radio station of Assumption Regional Catholic School in Galloway, New Jersey, and it is run by Mr. William Guerro, the school’s technology teacher, as part of the school’s technology program.
The music library holds nearly six thousand songs and recordings. Along with movie soundtracks and instrumental scores, the rotation carries ride and attraction audio, queue and background loops, parade and fireworks soundtracks, and park audio from Disney parks around the world — much of it in the native language of the park’s country. There is nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for and no advertising aimed at children.
How to listen
The quickest way is to press play on our Listen Live page in any web browser. On a phone or tablet, download the free Live365 app from the Apple App Store or Google Play and search for Magic of the Mouse Radio; the Listen Live page walks you through that step by step. Listening is free, and you never need an account.
Who makes it, and what students actually do
Students in grades 3 through 8 work on the station and this website during their weekly forty-five-minute technology class. Their work is the writing and the web publishing: the articles across our Student Newsroom topic pages, station news, and the pages that hold it all together. Older students also learn the site itself — building and editing pages in WordPress.
A few things students do not do, by design. They do not choose or program the music — the library is the teacher’s and is curated before anything reaches the air. There are no live DJs and no on-air call-ins or song-request lines. Nothing a student writes appears on this website until a teacher has read it and published it.
Student safety and privacy
This is the part most parents ask about first, so here it is in plain terms.
- No real names. Students never use their real names on the air or on the website. Each student picks a made-up on-air name, and it may not be a Disney character name or any other brand or character.
- No photos or video of students. None appear on the site, on the station’s social accounts or anywhere in the station’s materials.
- No student profiles or personal information. No grades, classes tied to individuals, email addresses or anything else that identifies a child.
- Recordings come down each year. Recorded student segments are removed from the public archive at the end of each school year.
- Teacher review before anything is public. Student work is drafted in limited school accounts that cannot publish to the live site or change anyone else’s work. A teacher reviews every draft and publishes it.
- Permission is opt-in, and optional. A permission slip goes home as an addendum to the media release already on file, with two separate yes-or-no lines: one for a student’s voice on the air, one for written work on the website. Participation in technology class never depends on it, and a student whose family says no still does all the same classwork.
What students are learning
The station is the reason to write, and the writing is the lesson. Across the year students practice picking a topic and researching it, writing for a real audience rather than for a folder, revising and proofreading, and publishing to the web. Along the way they learn how a content management system works, why a byline and a headline matter, how to check spelling and facts before something goes out, and what belongs and does not belong online — digital citizenship in a setting where the consequences are real and visible. All of it happens on school Chromebooks, in teams, with accounts that keep each team’s work in its own lane.
Music licensing, and our relationship to Disney
The station streams through Live365, whose broadcast service includes United States music licensing — agreements with ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR and SoundExchange among others — with automatic royalty reporting on every track played. In other words, the music is licensed and the songwriters and rights holders are paid for it.
Magic of the Mouse Radio is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by The Walt Disney Company. We are a school, a teacher and a group of students who love the music.
For teachers anywhere
You are welcome to use the station in your own classroom. It works well as background music for work time, quiet reading, art, indoor recess and transitions, and because it is instrumental a good deal of the time, it tends not to compete with a teacher’s voice. It is free, there is no account to create, and there is no advertising directed at students.
If you are thinking about building something similar with your own students, the shape of this project is simple enough to copy: a licensed streaming host so the music side is legal, a WordPress site the students write for, team logins limited so that nothing publishes without a teacher, printed draft sheets so the writing happens on paper first, and made-up on-air names so no child is ever identified. Questions about how any piece of it works are genuinely welcome — send them through the Contact page.
The newsroom rules students write by
Every student writer works from the same five rules. They are as much about respecting other people’s work as they are about good writing, and they are the reason our pages stay factual.
- Write it in your own words. Never copy and paste from a website — not from an encyclopedia, not from a fan page, not from Disney’s own site.
- No song lyrics. Describe what a song does and how it sounds, but never print the words.
- No pictures you found online. Photographs, movie stills, poster art and character drawings belong to the people who made them. Use a photo your own family took, or no picture at all.
- Name your sources. List where the facts came from at the bottom of the post.
- Quote sparingly. A sentence at most, and always say who said it.
Students write about Disney — the parks, the films, the music, the history — rather than writing new stories starring Disney characters. Facts, reviews and a writer’s own opinion are theirs to publish; a studio’s characters are not. That is the same reasoning behind the rule that a student’s made-up radio name may never be a Disney name.
Questions
Our Frequently Asked Questions page answers the short ones. For anything else, write to us through the Contact page. Families and staff at Assumption Regional Catholic School can also reach Mr. Guerro through the school office during the school day.