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Are teachers liable for the work that students post online as part of a class project?
The other day I got a tweat from a colleague asking me if teachers are liable for the online work that students do? She had overheard a teacher union rep tell a teacher, “Never allow your students to put things online — because you can be held liable for it.”
There went the baby and the bath water.
Just to be clear, I am not talking about things that students do online that are not connected to school. Things like Facebook and such that are not part of school work and have no connection to the teacher are not relevant for what we are talking about here. What I am talking about is student’s online work that is part of a classroom project.
Here is an example…
Let’s say you start an 8th grade classroom blog about the Civil War. You have each student start their own blog account with, let’s say Blogger, and then you start each student blogging about the Civil War as you give them weekly assignments. Soon your students are having a great time blogging and commenting on each other’s blogs and you feel like a great teacher — giving your students 21st Century Skills. A few weeks into the project you are asked to come to the principal’s office to meet with some angry parents who have just found out that their daughter has been cyberbullied by students in your class with posts that they have made on their blogs, their Civil War blogs. Or should I say — your Civil War blogs. They threaten to sue the school and you.
What do you do?
Does that mean we should never allow online classroom projects?
Here is what I think about it…
I think of student using the Internet like students using power tools, let me explain.
- Get Parent Permissions: I would never allow students to use dangerous power tools without getting their parent’s permission. So do the same with online projects. Send home a parent permission slip explaining the project and the risks that are involved. Invite the parents to be involved with online projects.
- Educate the Students: Don’t let a student use a table saw without explaining how it works and the safety rules. Train your students how to properly do work online, teach them about Internet Safety and how to be good digital citizens. Teach them about the rules — spell them out for them so they clearly understand. The school I teach at has a very clear policy on cyberbulling and my kids know it.
- Monitor Student Work: Watching students with power tools, keep them following the rules. Make sure to check in on what your students are doing online. Comment on their blogs, let them know you are watching and taking care of them online — just like if they were on a field trip. Don’t allow them to wander off and do other things, keep them close and focused on the project.
This is just simple “due diligence” on the part of the teacher when it comes to online classroom projects, this will keep you and your school out of a lot of how water. And most importantly, it can save a student from getting hurt online.
What do you think?
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Young students can’t podcast.
Young students can’t make movies.
etc. etc. etc.
The truth is they can.
But does this mean that we throw the idea of doing age-appropriate lessons out the window? No, of course not. We do not ask a second grader to blog the same way that we would ask a high school senior, but they both can blog.
When I first started to do movie making with my fourth and fifth grade students, many of my colleagues thought I was crazy. And perhaps I was, but I at least wanted to give it a try. So I started with the idea of how could I make movie making age-appropriate for my young students? And how could I do it with just a few pieces of inexpensive equipment? Since I knew nothing about movie making, I studied the Video Storytelling Guide on Atomic Learning. Now I knew about shots, audio, and filmmaking.
The next thing I did was to sit down with the students to get the outline for the movie. The students had been studying dramatic writing so they knew all about how to tell a good story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Since we knew the limitation of our equipment we decided on a few rules:
1) It had to be shot in the school. We had no money to go somewhere else to shoot.
2) Any dialogue would have to be done using a close-up shot so that our audio would be good.
3) All the shots would have to be simple, static shots. We would avoid panning or tilting the camera.
Soon we had our movie outline and script, so we were now able to start shooting. We broke the script down into a shot list and from there we started to shoot. One of the funny things that we didn’t see coming was that the actors had to remember to where the same clothes every Wednesday so that the shots would match.
Both the students and myself were amazed at how well the movie turned out.
Dude! Where’s my pencil? http://www.youtube.com/user/bethkeelementary#p/u/0/9TEBqs7kX2k
This morning while plowing through my incoming messages I came across an email from a fellow Google Certified Teacher; Darren Cannell, an assistant principal in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada. In his email he explained that he and his family will be embarking on a worldwide trip, traveling to 35 countries starting in September, and that as part of his travels, his 2nd grade son will be blogging about it.
- Image by woody1778a via Flickr
I checked out his son’s blog and it looks promising:
http://daxjournal.darrencannell.com
If you want to get really jealous, just check out the Google map and calendar, then you will see all of their destinations. I saw in the video section that they have used the TripAdvisor’s new TripWow tool that makes really cool videos from your photos.
I think it would be a great idea for your classroom to follow this young student as he travels the globe this winter, part of his schooling grade is to participate in comments on his blog — so get connected and be part of a cool project.
How can you use school technology to track this world traveling second grader?
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In my work as an edtech consultant and speaker I am often asked to look into my crystal ball and give my predictions about future of school technology. For example, when I keynoted at a district convention back in the summer of 2007 I spoke about how netbooks were going to take over our educational world. Some things I get right — like netbooks, and some things I get wrong — I’d rather not say.
So sit down, let’s turn down the lights and crank up the ol’ crystal ball and see what she says now…
I used to think that school technology is going to be split into two distinct categories:
Consuming Digital Content Devices; these devices are for just sitting back and browsing and using the Internet and apps. This is what most people do 90% of the time. Students researching, checking social network sites, browsing the web, etc.
- iPod Touch
- iPhone
- Droid Phone
- Kindle
- Nook
Creating Digital Content Devices; these are the more traditional devices that we use to type long articles and papers, edit audio, photos and video, etc.
- desktop computers
- laptop computers
- netbooks
So that is what I used to think — and then I got an iPad, which I thought was just going to be a consuming device. But then I started creating things on it, like this blog, I edit photos, I work on documents like spreadsheets — holy crud, I am creating on this stinking thing! That wasn’t suppose to happen.
Or was it?
The future of school technology is…
Drumroll please…
Mobile devices that can both create and consume content. Think about it — what we really want are devices that we can use to read books, research the web, take and edit photos and video, edit audio, tweat, blog, etc. In short we want it all, and we want it to fit in our pockets. We want to be able to consume digital content (about 90% of the time) but when we want to create, we don’t want to have to dust off the ol’ laptop just so we can write a blog. The iPad is just the beginning.
So hang on folks, we are about to see some pretty incredible edtech devices hit the market over the next 18 months.
Yesterday I went back to school shopping with my soon-to-be 16 year-old daughter, and somehow we ended up in the AT&T store with my daughter explaining to me that the new iPhone 4 was at the top of her list…
- iPhone 4
- notebooks
- pencils
- new backpack
- etc.
Get the idea?
I don’t think for a second that I am the only parent now faced with this type of a back to school shopping list. To be honest, I am not all that shocked, I remember a few years back when I had to buy a new TI graphing calculator that was $160 — so how do I argue with a $199 iPhone 4?
So we checked the coverage map and sure enough her high school is right next to a cell tower. (dang) This is important because her high school’s WiFi is locked to outsiders like iPhones and other smart phones.
She finished off her case by stating, “You should get one too and then we can use FaceTime to talk to each other.”
She had me: hook, line and sinker.
So now with regards to school technology and this blog — starting in a few weeks when students return back to school — many of them will have more technological power in their pockets than sitting on the desks of most school computer labs.
How does this change teaching? Do we ban these items or embrace them?
