Activity Five - Legal & Ethical Context

Legal and Ethical Contexts in My Digital Practice

Boundaries

So many digital ethical dilemmas! Unfortunately this is something that is a daily part of our teaching of  21st Century Learners. Henderson, Auld and Johnson (2014) argue that there are 4 ethical dilemmas to be taken into consideration; consent, confidentiality, boundaries and recognising and responding to illicit activity. When these are broken down, it's hard not to think, "How can a teacher, teach in a 21st Century context without crossing any,  if in fact not all of them every day?"

When I started back in the classroom in January this year, I knew that things had changed from when I was there 4 years earlier, however, I was unprepared for what was now required of a teacher. I was very uncomfortable with the fact that Facebook now seemed to be the norm for schools. "A great way of communicating with your families", I was told.  I was also informed that there was no set apps, blogs or form of social media to use but that it was accepted that 'something' would be used. I spent the first 3 weeks of Term 1, exploring and googling what the best option would be. Facebook it seemed was the social media of choice, it was easy to upload things onto , parents could place feedback almost instantaneously, and it was something that most whānau already had. I instantly had the dilemma of how to do it without allowing my personal identity and my school identity to become the same thing. Some things you couldn't control, like who posted on your wall (same reason I wouldn't 'friend' my mother-in-law!). Thankfully our school IT leader teaches next to me and we made a joint 'group' for our classes created from my 'school persona' and not my personal one.

As I said previously, I love having that instant feedback and approval from the whānau, but then I was faced with another dilemma. Having two children in my class whose parents were separated and one parent was not able to have any contact with those children. This  meant their photos or names, could never be used for anything that may mean their identity or whereabouts was exposed. We use a variety of devices and at events such as cross-country, swimming sports etc, photos were snapped and videos were taken. How did I ensure that these children's identities were kept safe? How much information did I share with the class, other teachers etc to prevent them from posting or uploading? 

I checked our school's protocols and searched for what seemed like hours, trying to find answers to my questions, and finally found what I was looking for in In the Ministry of Education (2015) publication of Digital Technology Safe and Responsible Use in Schools where a heading was "Prevention is better than response". 

I sat down with both whānau and explained the  (my) dilemma to them, how I would do my best to ensure the identities of their children, but I could only control my classroom side of things. It turns out that I had actually made it bigger in my head than it really was and the boundaries as discussed in Henderson, Auld and Johnson (2014) weren't quite as big a hurdle as I had thought. There are dilemmas, and there are DILEMMAS - I just need to sort them out in my head first!!!


References:


Henderson, M., Auld, G., & Johnson, N. F. (2014). Ethics of Teaching with Social Media. Paper presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference 2014, Adelaide, SA. Retrieved from http://acec2014.acce.edu.au/sites/2014/files/attachments/HendersonAuldJohnson_EthicalDilemmas_ACEC_2014_0.pdf

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