What the Tech?

Working through questions about technology and education

Month: April 2020

Am I an Open Teacher?

April 18, 2020 / / 1 Comment

“opencontent” by jlori is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

So last week we read about privacy and keeping your data protected. This week, we are reading about putting it all out there. In their chapter, Designing for Open and Social Learning, Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt talk about learning through Open Courses, Personal Learning Networks (PLNs), Open teachers, social media (2016). In We Need a Massive Surveillance Program, Maciej CegƂowski argues for throwing privacy concerns out the window for a good cause, namely tracking the spread of COVID-19 (2020).

How do I apply these readings to my practice as a Kindergarten teacher? First of all, Kindergarten is all about Social Learning but their experience needs to be primarily inside the classroom. They are learning about Copyright and intellectual property by learning about sharing, giving and taking credit for ideas, and not taking things that do not belong to them. As pre-readers, their internet searches are restricted to what they can access through icons and images provided by adults so copying and pasting off the internet is not really an issue yet.

Their Personal Learning Network is primarily within their family and the school community. They are not at all ready to pilot their own social media. It may be that some children have their own social media but these sites are overseen closely by adults. I am considering starting a class Twitter account. We would discuss together each Friday, what significant thing from the week do we think others might be interested in seeing. What is appropriate to show or say? Who do we want to follow or engage with through hashtags and mentions? I would shape their PLN’s with guests and experts from the community such as veterinarians, firefighters, or scientists. This would be an ideal way to model digital citizenship.

I have talked about FreshGrade before. This is a way to share student learning with families at home. While FreshGrade does have a student app so students can upload their own work, in kindergarten, it is not an easy thing to do so their uploads are in my hands. That said, because of COVID-19 remote learning, I have just given control of the students apps to the parents at home so they can share student work with me! I might continue this practice is post-pandemic kindergarten since many children exhibit significant learning at home.

What about open teaching? I would like to be an open teacher but at present it seems pretty impractical and time consuming. I do use open software such as Libreoffice and GIMP but I admit, that was not through some notion of being an open teacher. Not so long ago, our district began using open software in response to the contracting budgets of the former provincial government. After the district switched to Microsoft, I merely continued to use what I had become accustomed to.

Couros (2016)

Am I a networked teacher? Not really but I am getting better. Up until I started UVic courses last year, I kept a pretty low profile on social media.  I was a lurker on Twitter. I certainly did not blog about my professional learning. Even with family and friends on Facebook, I am not a prolific contributor. Mostly, I can never find the time.  Before COVID-19 remote learning, it was not uncommon for me to be puttering at school until 6 or 7 pm. 

I wish I could say that I use only open resources but I have found that it takes less time for me to make my own resources than sift through the sparse open resources I have found that apply to kindergarten. I do use free resources from sites like Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers, and various teacher blog sites but I am not sure if they count as open resources as they are often meant to be teasers for other paid content.

What would be ideal is if all the content on the internet was considered open content. If creators want it to be copyright protected then they need to find a mechanism for keeping it private just like, if I want my student’s data to be private, I have to go the extra mile to protect it.

BIG DATA vs me

April 11, 2020 / / 1 Comment

“Who’s Watching Big Data?” by cogdogblog is licensed under CC0 1.0

This week, I read the paper, Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: twenty-first century student sorting and tracking (Regan & Jesse, 2019). I also read the blog post, We Need A Massive Surveillance Program. The Regan and Jesse paper talks about the ethical impact of educational technology and big data. They raise six privacy concerns: information privacy, anonymity, surveillance, autonomy, non-discrimination, and ownership of information. It is an alarming paper because it seems to confirm what I have long suspected, anyone who really wants my data can get it regardless of how I feel about it. For ordinary people like me, the only solace is believing that no one is likely to be all that interested in attaching my data to me personally. There are people who are so far advanced in their computer skills, it would be easier to get rid of my cell phone and go live off the grid in the woods than it would be to protect my data from those who want so badly to use it.

Thank goodness for people like Maciej CegƂowski, who defines himself as a privacy activist. These are the people with the knowledge to really battle big data. The best I can do for myself is read the privacy agreements on the apps I choose to use, be critical of what advertising or click-bait comes my way, and be wary of what I am putting out into the world. As an educator, however, it’s a different story.

As a teacher, I rely largely on the expertise of the information technology (IT) staff at the school district office. Even so, when they came along this week and said I cannot use Zoom for conferencing with my home-bound kindergarten class, I was irked. At first the reason appeared to be the threat of Zoombombing and I was convinced I had it licked when I figured out the safety settings from the Zoom website. Then it came down that the provincial government had purchased licences and I thought, surely now, I could have some face-to-face time with the littles. But, no. Our district claims they need to wait for actual access and then conduct their own analysis. Again, irked.

“Maple Leaf Forever.” by Just a Prairie Boy is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Along with the latest news also came the revelation that Zoom stores its data in the United States and the new licensed version would store our data in Canada. UGH…okaaaay. I have heard this argument before. When the district was pushing us toward FreshGrade, stored in Canada, rather than Seesaw, which is stored in the U.S., I was not happy. I found Seesaw to be a simpler tool than FreshGrade just as I see Zoom to be a simpler tool than Microsoft Teams, which the school district supports.

Then there’s Google. The district is apparently letting this one go because there is no alternative readily available. The district solution to possible privacy issues with Google was to make guardians of our students sign a permission form. That way, the liability lies with the adults responsible for their children. However, I doubt very much that many of these responsible adults have any idea what the possible issues are with exposing their children’s data. Parents place a lot of trust in the teacher’s knowledge when it comes to internet safety and privacy (Knauf, 2016). They do not know that I knew about as much as anyone up until a few months ago. Even now, while I have come to believe that I should do my best to protect my data and my students’ data, I am not sure I know what data is being collected and what is being used for. I am not sure guardians of my students should be trusting me when it comes to these things. It makes me wonder how much the IT staff really know. Is it worth the worry if data can be reidentified anyway? Is it enough to teach people how to protect themselves from criminal activity?

As an educator, my concern needs to lie with protecting children as well as I can and fostering the development of humans who are critical of the information that travels to and fro on the internet so at some point, the government will be overwhelmed by their demands for data protection. We need more people to become privacy activists. For my part, I will teach digital literacy to my students while taking care to maintain their privacy as well as possible. If I must publish their work, let it be on a password protected site storing its data in Canada. If students need to communicate over distance, let it be over district approved, data stored in Canada video conferencing site or email. I will do the best I can with what I know, even if it is irksome.

As for CegƂowski’s suggestion that the fight against COVID-19 would benefit from a massive surveillance program. If it saves lives, I am all for it. If it is true that the necessary data is already being collected then do it. That said, I would like to think that CegƂowski’s blog post is based in the U.S. and no such surveillance exists here in Canada though. I would like to think that Canada is the moral centre of the digital world and that all data is safe here. Wouldn’t that be nice?


References

CegƂowski, M. (2020, March 23). We Need A Massive Surveillance Program (Idle Words). https://idlewords.com/2020/03/we_need_a_massive_surveillance_program.htm

Knauf, H. (2016). Interlaced social worlds: Exploring the use of social media in the kindergarten. Early Years, 36(3), 254–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1147424

Regan, P. M., & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

Remote Kindergarten

April 5, 2020 / / 4 Comments

This week’s blog post is supposed to be about Makerspaces and fostering creativity with digital tools. I am not sure if I’ll get to that but I would like to talk about the realities of designing remote learning for Kindergarten. The BC Ministry of Education is asking kindergarten educators to provide one hour of educational opportunities per day. That sounds easy but before we can do it, we have to examine what our learners, and their families, really need.

We must first consider that the remote learning experience necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic is not like the distance learning programs organized by school districts. In Distance Learning, there is a home-facilitator who has thought about all the demands of home schooling and consciously made the decision to dedicate their time to educating their children. The facilitator and the learners, no doubt, have many innate qualities that make them suited to teaching and learning at home. The situation for parents and guardians suddenly dropped into the role may be quite different.

There are some parents that I spoke to this week that are thrilled to be forced to be at home with their children. They have been on homeschooling websites and Pinterest. They are building forts, skate ramps, collages, and paper machĂ© globes. Natural makers! They have bought commercially available workbooks because, “He loves that kind of work!” These children are hungry for learning and the families are happy to keep working along their own way. What they are hoping for are opportunities for their children to interact with their friends. Then there are the others.

For a start, every teacher of young children has seen that students behave drastically differently with family than with adults and children at school. Some children are much more likely to resist schooling at home than in a classroom where perceived authority, well-practiced routines, and peer pressure help to keep learners moving forward. This resistance may result in increased tensions in the home at what is already a stressful time for many families. These families are looking to us to provide something structured for their children to do. They are hoping that if they can say, “Your teacher says you have to do this,” the child will be more inclined to do it.

Some adults have the added challenge of having their own jobs to do at home. Older caregivers simply do not have the energy to keep up. We are in week one and I have already spoken to three adults who are struggling with their children/grandchildren. High quality education is not the goal as much as keeping them busy.

Now add diversity and inclusion to the mix. Then, there are the scary things: children living in poverty, children living with abusive adults, and children without good nutrition. For some of these children, school is the safe place, where they are immersed in social connection.

And finally, there’s this email note from a parent:

We are not used to using technology in our house – it’s very limited, so, despite my awareness that it’s useful at this moment, I would love to maintain our guidelines at home. When work is provided, I’d love it to be…based on doing the activity (paper/pencil, hands-on, etc) with technology as a means of communication and supplemental learning resources, not the sole tool. I think what I’m trying to say is I don’t want anyone to become ‘used’ to using technology because of this ‘school at home’ phase we’re in. 

Now take all these considerations and put them in the hands of educators who are phenomenal at their classroom jobs but are terrified of technology. Don’t get me wrong, there are many tech-savvy teachers out there, but the ones that need help, need A LOT of help.

So what does all this mean for designing remote learning for Kindergarten? For us it means providing as many choices as we can. We design with some routine activities, ones that students can do independently because they have done them before. We design some open ended activities so they can get creative with those keen parents and siblings. We design with activities that can be printed out and activities that can be acted out. We design with some activities that can be completed online and some that can be done orally. We design some activities that use apps for the tech savvy, and some that use paper and pencil for the technophobic. We search out photos and videos and make our own photos and videos, and ask for them to send photos and videos. We design activities that can be done indoors, outdoors, and out the window. We create far more than one hour of activities per day. Then we tell our home facilitators that the social-emotional wellbeing of their family is the most important thing and they don’t have to do any of it if it causes any undue stress.

In the end, the most significant thing we can do is talk with them, connect as much as possible, and facilitate connections between them. I would like to video conference with them so they can all see each others’ faces, even if only for the few minutes their attention spans allow. Because nothing online is ever simple, we have to wait and see if our school district will permit us to use Zoom. Zoom could very well be the most import digital tool for my little learners. We could use Microsoft Teams but because we can only see four faces, it won’t be as engaging for the littles and I won’t see the quiet ones. I will stand in their driveways to see them if I have to, because while I may be a remote Kindergarten teacher at the moment, I refuse to let them be invisible.

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