Privacy is a controversial issue in the Digital Age. Schools have an obligation to ensure student safety, both physical and virtual. When using the Internet or the network, this requires keeping close tabs on student’ activity when they are using computers. Do you think this violates students’ privacy? Justify your opinion and consider both points of view.
No, I do not think this violates their privacy. In fact, the text discussed the CIPA law, and part of that states that children need to be taught how to be responsible online. Just like any other subject that we teach students, we cannot expect them to instinctively know what is appropriate online and what is not. The only way for teachers to be able to educate them on this and protect them is to monitor their usage. I feel that when students have been told that they will be monitored that it is not so much of an invasion of privacy. An invasion of privacy only occurs when a reasonable person would expect they are not being watched. So, by telling them up front that they are being monitored they should know to keep private activities on home computers. And, honestly, even looking at this from the other perspective, students need to understand that online, there really is no such thing as privacy. I think one issue that might be implied here is looking at search history and things like that. In the library, we are not allowed to share the titles of books students have checked out due to that violating their privacy. I could see the same thing applying to search history. That type of thing really is not the teacher’s business, but at the same time, it might be revealed as the teacher is monitoring for other reasons.
The text also mentioned some actions of teachers that could violate privacy which I did not really consider before. One of those things is posting work samples of a student online without permission. This is clearly a violation of privacy, but some teachers might think it is okay to post a funny paragraph a student wrote if they do not share the name. However, a photo like that could be traced back by handwriting, so without parent permission it is not okay. The other issue is student info and pictures. Our district did have a policy that pictures could be shared with parent permission but they did not post student names on the pictures. I thought this was a good idea to protect the children, however, I have now seen a few images posted with names on them. I’m not sure if this was an accident or if the policy has changed. There are so many aspects of privacy to consider. Some are very cut and dried like student record information. Others, such as search history and online activity, are not.
Of the emerging technology trends presented in the chapter or those you discovered through your research on the Web, which emerging technology or trend do you think will have the most significant impact on education?
I had not heard of it before, but I think the idea of learner analytics has the most potential to impact education. My understanding is that these analytics can be run on the components of a lesson before instruction happens and it can determine what the success rate of the lesson would be. This would be an amazing tool to have at the educator’s disposal. Imagine plugging in all of your instructional activities and having the success rate right in front of you before teaching a thing. If the score was low, changes could be made before hand. It could potentially save thousands of hours in wasted instructional time. The downside to me would be taking away the teachable moments that sometimes occur out of the blue. It would also take a significant amount of time to create or potentially have to recreate a lesson after finding out it was not going to be very successful.
This week, I created a few online resources that did not take much time, but would be a great compliment to any lesson. The resources we used this week allow a teacher to gather specific information for her class and then let them explore on their own. I created a ThinkLink for the true story behind our novel unit, and a Scoop.It for the research component.
ThinkLink
Scoop.It