Am I an Open Teacher?

“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 Cegłowski 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.