Legal and Ethical Dilemmas in My Practice

Legal and Ethical Contexts in My Digital Practice
The potentially worldwide audience for our students to share their learning using chromebooks is both exciting and carries the possibility of danger. Knowing that your learning stories posted on your blog can be read by anyone in the world, means that you put extra thought and effort into informing, entertaining, persuading and engaging your reader.
But…..
The dilemma for me as a teacher and also for my students is that although communicating with such a huge audience is awesome, there are things that could make this unsafe for them.
If their blog posts include photos that identify the students, these could be used in ways not agreed to by the child or their families. At this stage we have not experienced this but we have to be careful when allowing students to include these. Our families sign a document indicating whether or not they want photos to be taken or videos to be made of their children while they are at school and published.
Those viewing the blog posts may be able to identify personal information about a child that their families do not want known.
A person viewing a blog may not be able to recognise or understand the context for the post eg That the child is special needs and their post is a great example of their best learning. They may also make judgements about the post without enough information to do this thoughtfully.
Unacceptable comments about the posts could result in cyber bullying taking place and the associated effects on the child being bullied. This has not happened yet either but is a real possibility.
Our school has several policies and practises to try and mitigate the risk of this happening.
  • The child, their parents and their teacher read, learn and sign a The Kawa of Care. These are guidelines for safe and supportive use of digital devices. It does not specifically refer to safe sharing of information but has general recommendations about being cyber safe
  • The Corinna School Internet Code of Conduct for Students states
-Do not give out personal information such as your address ….. The name or location of your school…. Without your teacher’s/parents’ permission.
-Inform your teacher/parents right away if you come across any information that makes you feel uncomfortable
-Do not send a person your picture or anything else without first checking with your parents
Even though these ways to counter the possible negative effects of posting learning stories on blogs are recorded, we still need to constantly revisit them and remind the students to use the key competencies that they are very well aware of, to keep themselves safe. I’m not sure that we do this enough. I think using the key competencies when working with digital tools is hugely important.
  • We check and give feedback to all students about their learning stories,, so are aware of the content of their posts and the feedback they get from others. So far we have had no comments made about the posts from anyone except classmates and whanau
  • We use Hapara to check on the students’ learning as they are doing it as well as emails they send.
  • We remove digital devices from students who are using the breaking the Kawa of Care and they are only returned when there has been  a ‘sorting out’ discussion (that sometimes involves parents) Eg. What did you do? What did you want to happen? What should you have done? Who was affected by this? How can we make this right?
Records are kept of the discussions held.
The  guidelines in Digital Technology Safe and responsible use in school has some recommendations that would and do help us to deal with the dilemma.
  • Preventing incidents before they happen is much better than having to respond to them. So we do need to make sure that our students understand the risks when posting information online and know what to do.
  • The responsibility for effective approaches is best shared so there needs to be regular communication between students teachers, parents and whanau. We recently met with a parent as part of the ‘sorting out process’ for her daughter who had lost her chromebook for inappropriate chatting.
  • The teacher can retain the surrendered digital device for a reasonable period. (If a digital device is retained details of the incident must be recorded) We do this on our school management system
  • When responding to incidents focus more on the behaviour involved and less on the digital technology. We try to do this when having ‘sorting out’ discussions
NetSafe’s Learn, guide, Protect model  is really helpful for us.
Learn: We need to actively facilitate the learning of the values and competencies that enable our students to keep themselves and others safe online
Guide:
We need programmes and practises needs to integrate online safety into all learning areas
Protect:
We need to either create policies, plans and practises to protect online learners or check that existing ones already do.




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