Our school has had a challenging first year of 'Bring your own device' while heading down the Chromebook in classrooms track. We upgraded antiquated devices with 10 new Chromebooks per class. This has both enabled and enriched learning experiences for students. It does seem however that there are some interesting ethical discussions arising from.
e-Learning Agreement:
Our school has always had an ICT agreement (which used to be separate from our school agreement...) to encourage kids to think about the way they use the internet and devices at school. This agreement became outdated with the introduction of BYOD devices at the start of the year. This year we have had several ethical issues around technology use with students having their own devices.It becomes confusing and not so transparent when students are able to 'play games' and 'take selfies' in their own time, but not at school. We have experienced situations involving emails being sent to parents out of context during the school day creating kaos without the teacher evening being aware of a situation.
The Situation:
In my classroom a student used her device to take 'funny selfies' before school with friends and decided to load the image (of students in their school uniform) to Instagram after school. Some parents were made aware of the image (which I was completely unaware of!) and let me know via email a kid has been posting images on instagram during class time. As you can imagine this was a tricky situation that did not really breach our code of conduct around ICT - I established that the photo happened outside of class time.The student did however not take into account the other kids in the photo, or that they were in school uniform. To resolve the issue we had a great discussion as a class about appropriate use of technology at school, and made sure that we think before posting any images online. It did lead to other interesting discussions around public blogs, school photos on Facebook of trips, etc...
Solution?
To address this specific issue (school wide) we made changes to our e-Learning agreement to make sure that devices are not used during break times. We will need to develop a program to help teach students (and teachers) learn about appropriate ICT use at our school. Our school's solution used to be 'block' sites so it's not a problem at school... this obviously doesn't enable kids to learn about responsible use.We will use the 'Common Sense Media' website to help guide our program development to ensure teachers and students feel supported in learning about keeping our digital footprints positive.
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