Privacy and Filtering

Week 10

Contrast the issues of privacy and filtering when using the Web in the classroom. What are the responsibilities of a teacher in each of these areas?

First and foremost, when it comes to the area of privacy and schools, in no way should a teacher ever put a student’s name or picture on a webpage on the internet. This can put the child at harm for suspecting child molesters or for any persons who are looking to harm that child. There are also very strict guidelines set forth by the school in each district for what the teacher can also put on the school webpage, as well, and each teacher, if they choose to put something online, should be knowledgeable about these guidelines. If, for example, a teacher wanted to put a sample of a student’s writing online, as a guide on how to write a term paper, the teacher could omit the name and write “this is student A’s paper on how the mummification process in ancient Egypt was conducted.” Or if it was written by a group of students, the teacher could write “this is a step by step procedure by group C in first period on how to carefully weigh a small amount of unknown mass.” The point is that in no way should anyone on the site know who the teacher is talking about, or should there be pictures of the students on the page.

Filtering, on the other hand, is from the opposite spectrum. It is what the school wants to keep the students from gaining access to. Privacy can be seen as what we do not want other people to see at the school, filtering can be viewed as what we do not want our students at the school to see online. For instance, I would assume (and hope) that most, if not all schools in the U.S. would have some sort of adult filter on their school computers. This would mean that students on these computers would not be given access to adult sites. Other “harmful” sites could be gang, violence, drug, or crime related websites. We do not want our students to view these websites at all, much less at school. I know at my school, our school filter has Youtube and Myspace blocked. They cannot view these sites on any school computer.

The role of the teacher in both privacy and filtering is to keep the student safe. We as teachers need to keep students safe in privacy because we do not want strangers or deviants on the outside to gain information about our students inside our schools, and potentially harm them before or after school hours. With filtering, we can hopefully avoid some knowledge of heinous behavior at school through the use of the internet, and it is through the compliance of all the staff that this works. No plan is fool-proof, but we can take baby-steps in the right direction. Cyber-bullying has submerged as a new type of bullying recently. This is where people insult, bully, and heckle their classmates through instant messages, blogs, and personal websites at home. When students leave the classroom, school does not end for all classmates. Some of the children carry it home with them. With online access at home, some students can feel like they’re back at school again. But at school, we can try to make them feel safe while we’re there.