Trying to Teach About the Privacy Rights

Outcomes

CRB10.1- Comprehend and respond to a variety of visual, oral, print, and multimedia texts that address:
• identity (e.g., Diversity of Being);
• social responsibility (e.g., Degrees of Responsibility); and
• social action (agency) (e.g., Justice and Fairness)

CC B10.2 Create and present a visual or multimedia presentation supporting a prepared talk on a researched issue, using either digital or other presentation tools.

Digital Continuum Skills

Understanding the legal implications of online activity

Course Theme

Equity and Ethics

Overview of the topic and lesson

Privacy rights and other aspects of the legal implications of digital citizenship can be difficult to teach. These topics are dense and complicated. Even trained legal professionals could struggle to adequately explain how privacy rights work, and what the implications of them are, so how are teachers supposed to be able to properly prepare students to understand their rights online. This is a difficult topic to try and approach, but organisations have tried to give a road map for how to teach about this.

In 2016, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and MediaSmarts teamed up to try and create resources for teachers to teach their students about online privacy and some of the legal consequences that can come from being online. One of the resulting lessons was titled “The Privacy Dilemma.”

The lesson takes students through a series of case studies about students dealing with privacy issues online. The first one is about a Grade 10 student named Rick who notices a camera in his school cafeteria. Seeing the camera makes Rick think about all of the cameras he interacts with on a day to day basis, from school to the webcam in his computer. This leads Rick to do more research about cameras in public, and he presents a report to his class about what he learned. The second case study is about a Grade 12 student named Jill who starts to get targeted ads for dating services on a website she shops on. Jill begins to worry that she is getting sent ads that are someone far older than her, and she starts to think about whether her younger sister could get similar ads online. The final case study is about a Grade 9 boy named Jared who gets in trouble at school for photos that were posted online of him without his permission. A photo was taken of Jared drinking something, and people begin to claim that it was alcohol. Jared objects, but he gets into trouble with his parents over the photo (Johnson, 2016). Students are to be divided into groups, with each group doing a different case study before sharing their findings with the class.

Each case study has some value, but there is also potential for them to be elevated slightly. Instead of just reading and sharing about their case study, students could create a role play, or write an alternative scenario. This could allow students to start to think about a time in their lives when they experienced something similar.

After going through their case studies, students are to go onto the Privacy Commissioner of Canada website to the “What information is collected about me when I am online section?” Students are supposed to go through the website and see how much of the information on it applies to them. As well, they are supposed to learn about what information is collected about them as soon as they go onto a website, and try to learn what they can do to protect their privacy online (Johnson, 2016). The hope is that students will learn about the different ways their data can be collected, and what they can do to stop this, such as using private browsers and adding content blockers, as well as managing their internet history (Office of the Privacy Commissioner, 2020).

The culminating activity for this lesson is to have students create a video essay about what they have learned about privacy. To successfully do this, they are encouraged to go through the full process of creating a video, from storyboarding and scripting, to getting ready to shoot the video. This is a valuable part of the video creation process because it allows students to see the full process that is necessary to create a video. As well, their videos are not supposed to be too long. MediaSmarts encourages just a one to two minute video (Johnson, 2016). This could allow students to use platforms they may be more familiar with, such as TikTok, to upload their content to. As well, the content they create could be used to be shared with other students to teach them about privacy online, and what they can do to protect their data.

As well, there are other ways that students could use what they learned to help encourage others around the school to learn about online privacy. Students could create a podcast through a service like Audacity to communicate problems people have had with online privacy, or they could create posters and other marketing materials on services like Canva to educate their fellow students about these issues.

By providing students with opportunities to educate their peers about these issues, they may be encouraged to take more control of their learning, and they may be able to more effectively communicate a message about digital citizenship to their peers. By allowing students to use mediums they are familiar with, it may allow them to provide a more powerful message.

Refernces

Couros, A. & Hildebandt, K. (2015). Digital Citizenship Education in Saskatchewan Schools. Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. file:///Users/jordanhalkyard/Downloads/83322-DC_Guide_-_ENGLISH_2%20(5).pdf.

Johnson, M. (2016). The Privacy Dilemma. MediaSmarts. https://mediasmarts.ca/sites/default/files/pdfs/lesson-plan/Lesson_Privacy_Dilemma.pdf.

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. (2020, Jan.). What kind of information is being collected about me online? https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/about-the-opc/what-we-do/awareness-campaigns-and-events/privacy-education-for-kids/fs-fi/choice-choix/.

Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2011). Saskatchewan Curriculum: English Language Arts 10. https://curriculum.gov.sk.ca/CurriculumHome?id=37.

Starting off the semester with a technology survey

When looking through the Saskatchewan Digital Citizenship Continuum, one of the first key skills students will need to do is look at their schools technology policy and use that to co-create a “Responsible Use Policy” (2015). This policy should make it clear how students can use technology in the classroom, and what appropriate use would look like. However, before these kinds of policies can be created, proper modelling of what proper use means and what that could look like in the classroom.

In our current climate, the use of technology in the classroom is becoming a very hot topic. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has even recently found that one in four countries have banned the use of smartphones in schools, with it being mose common in South and Central Asia (2023). Proponents for such bans claim that they help to raise student grades, and help to protect students from the frequent distractions that come from frequent smartphone notifications. However, there is also contention that the outright banning of technology from schools will lead to even greater disadvantages for students as they will be unable to work with the technologies that make it necessary to succeed in the modern world.

This is why it is necessary to find a balance between the two sides. Students need to understand that technology is like any other tool. There are times to use them, and times when they may not be the best help. As well, outright bans of technology from schools takes one group out of the discussion: the students.

Students need to be empowered to have a voice in how technology will be used in their classrooms and how they use to look. At the start of the school year, students should take part in a discussion about what technology should look like in their classroom, and what appropriate classroom technology behaviour is.

The Purpose of the Survey

I created an example survey on Google Forms that could be used at the beginning of the semester to get an understanding of students use of technology.

My reasoning in creating this survey was to understand students access to technology at home, and to also get a feeling for what they think would be appropriate when it comes to classroom technology use. Their suggestions around what an appropriate classroom policy would be would allow for students to have more agency in how class is conducted, and it would also allow them to reflect on their own technology use. Hopefully, this would set a baseline for what appropriate behaviour would look like in the classroom. As well, the survey could be used as a way to gage what knowledge students are coming into the classroom with when it comes to technology. It should give some idea of what skills students have when they come into the classroom, as well as what technological skills they want to work on the most for the semester.

Conclusion

While some believe that using technology in the classroom should be limited to try and prevent distraction, forbidding technology in the classroom may lead to students being further behind in the digital skills they need to be developing. Hopefully, by allowing students to have a voice in how technology should be used in their classrooms students will feel like they have contributed to the discussion of what is appropriate or not, and they will have a clearer idea of what appropriate online behaviour looks like in their circumstances.

References

Couros, A. & Hildebandt, K. (2015). Digital Citizenship Education in Saskatchewan Schools. Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. file:///Users/jordanhalkyard/Downloads/83322-DC_Guide_-_ENGLISH_2%20(5).pdf.

United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. (2023). Global education monitoring report 2023: Technology, in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms? https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000385723.