Concerns about student info on the web
Concerns about student info on the web (Via Blog Juice for Educational Technology.) We need to have good answers to these concerns, and good programs for educating students to avoid these dangers (when posting outside of school as well), if we hope for “the read/write web in education” to find acceptance in resistant communities… and to be safe for our students.
A related question came up from Darren Kuropatwa in the comments here earlier this week, and I am planning to post a reply soon. I expect I’ll need a good one before the internet safety parent class in Brea-Olinda anyway. ;)
February 15th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Hi Mark,
The points made in that article are good ones. Teachers, as responsible adults, at their discretion may post pictures of themselves captioned with their full name and place of work. As adults, this is a freedom we have, but with freedom comes responsibility. We shouldn’t be making those decisions for our students — their parents should. As a parent I can’t see myself ever giving permission for any of my children’s pictures to be posted on the internet captioned with their names, schools or any other identifying information.
With that said I think it’s important to bring the use of read/write web tools into the classroom. This should go hand in hand with discussions of online safety and appropriate online behaviour. What’s happening now is kids are doing all kinds of foolish things at places like MySpace.com because they have no responsible models to follow — they’re not receiving an education about this stuff so they act out of ignorance. Isn’t it better to educate them as opposed to just keeping the tools out of schools so that kids go home and use their MySpace sites in dangerous ways? This might be an interesting perspective to share in Brea-Olinda. ;-)
February 17th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Darren, I appreciate the freedom versus responsibility dichotomy.
This applies to much of what we do with technology… in and out of school. Your reminder that students will do foolish things at MySpace if we don’t educate them of the dangers is getting at the same thing my sex ed metaphor does; “it’s a fact of life, and it’s better if we teach our students how to be safe than to pretend they don’t do it.”