Technology Use Scenario - cameras in classrooms?

My technology use scenario is as follows: “Dr. Brown, principal at Bluebird Elementary School, is concerned with safety in his school, both for his staff and for his students. During the summer, Dr. Brown had cameras installed in each of the classrooms. The video from each of these cameras is viewable on the internet, so that parents can check on their students’ classes during the day. Some parents are concerned that because these cameras are connected to the internet, other people could also use them to “spy” on their children. Do we have an expectation of privacy while at work, home or play?” (Ribble, p. 121)

The individual in this situation, Dr. Brown, is not using technology appropriately. We do have an expectation of some level of privacy while at work, home and play. Privacy is unfortunately not a black and white issue however, it can be reasonably understood that one has a right to privacy in his or her own home or a bathroom in a public place or school, for example, more so than if you were outside mowing your lawn where anyone who walks or drives by can see what you are doing. Dr. Brown is not using technology appropriately because according to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) Dr. Brown must limit the use and disclosure of the camera videos (Filsinger, p. 313). He must not disclose the information to third parties unless he obtains consent (in this case from the parents since the students are minors) (Filsinger, p. 313). Third parties would be all of the other people able to view the cameras on the internet, which the parents are against and therefore, consent would not be granted.

I also believe that since an elementary school contains children aged three to 13 there should be a greater expectation of privacy due to the extra precautions and safety measures that need to be taken against things such as abductions and bullying. Since these students cannot give consent to being videotaped themselves as they are under the age or majority, it is up to the parents, staff at Bluebird Elementary School and Dr. Brown to understand and weigh the benefits and risks of having these cameras in the classrooms and act in the best interests of the students.      

Personally, I think Dr. Brown may install the cameras in classrooms (a common area with a relatively low expectation of privacy) but I do not think these cameras should be viewable on the internet. School security should have access to the tapes and parents should be contacted only if there is an issue. If there were a more secure way that parents could view the cameras other than what is presumably an open link on the internet, this would be the better option if parents still insist on being able to check up on their children.   

Resources

Filsinger, K. (2015). Employment law for business and human resources professionals  (Third Edition). Toronto, ON: Edmond Montgomery Publications.

Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools (Third Edition). United States of America: International Society for Technology in Education.

Week 8- Wiki means quick

This week I furthered my collaboration tool knowledge and touched a bit upon a tool I really didn’t understand very well at first – wikis! I’ve obviously used Wikipedia many, many times (and knew it was a wiki) but now I can explain to you what a wiki actually is. A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows multiple people to edit and save or link other information in a web page. I also learned that the word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian language meaning quick or fast – a little fun fact for you!

I found this video by Common Craft to be really helpful with understanding just how a wiki works and its true collaborative capabilities. While wikis keep a history of the revisions made, provide a space for discussion and has settings that enable different users to do different things (view, edit, etc.) I personally still like Google Docs better. This may be a completely biased point of view given my total familiarity and experience with Google Docs and lack of experience and familiarity with wikis. However, I find that most of the collaborating I do at this point in my life must ultimately end up in a document or PDF format, making Google Docs the better choice for me.

With that being said, I also really enjoyed reading Donald Clark’s blog post on wikis and the various things they can be used for. I thought Donald’s point about how wikis teach you to be collaborative within a given set of rules where decision-making and agreement are ultimately necessary was a really great one that can be applied to collaboration tools across the board.

This week, one of our other tasks was to come up with what we think are the three most important digital rights and responsibilities. The three I chose are the right to cite, the right to privacy and the right to stop and report cyber bullying. For starters, it's so easy to search for information and pass it off as your own, but this would be completely digitally irresponsible. Other people put lots of effort into the research and work they put out onto the Internet for us all to access; the right and digitally responsible thing to do is give them the credit that they deserve.

The right to privacy is important because although we live in such a digitized age where information is so easy to come by, when someone exercises their right to privacy by locking various accounts, for example, they also have a right to assume that Facebook will respect their privacy wishes and maintain the privacy of their account. Lastly, the right to stop and report cyber bullying is very important. Part of being digitally responsibly is "treating others as you would like to be treated" over the Internet just as you would in person, even though you cannot see their face. Everyone should feel safe when using the Internet!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

Every year I’ve been at Brock, there have been students sleeping outside of Taro Hall for one week every March. Organized by the Business Students’ Association, 5 Days for the Homeless is a great campaign that helps to raise awareness and donations for the great issue that is homelessness. Every year when I walk by the students sleeping outside who have given up things like electronics, warmth, showers and clean clothes for the week, it really opens my eyes to the fact that there are so many who deal with these issues for much longer than five days. Read the article here and keep an eye out and some spare change handy for these students outside of Taro Hall this week!

Week 7- Google Docs is a student’s best friend

Once again, I was very excited to see the focus of this week’s lesson was on the Google Docs collaboration tool! We are currently in the process of creating an online presentation with a few of our classmates and although my group members and I all go to the same school, we must use Google docs to create the presentation completely online instead of meeting in person.

I personally have become a huge fan of Google Docs over my university career… mostly within the past couple of years when I really started having to complete group papers and presentations, so I strongly believe that the educational benefits from this tool are huge. Just off the top of my head, some of its greatest benefits are the team’s ability to share ONE link and work in ONE document instead of constantly sharing revised Word files, the ability to make ‘suggestions’ to the document’s content instead of making outright changes (this is similar to the ‘track changes’ function in Word), the ability to download the final online copy into a Word document or a PDF and the ability to see all revisions and re-add something that was deleted instead of creating, typing, or searching for it again!

Just a quick story about my last point; last semester I had a massive group paper due for a class and I had spent hours editing our paper on Google docs. After I was done, I closed the document and went back to it a little bit later and all of my changes were missing (imagine my reaction as Google Docs is supposed to save changes automatically – which it normally does). I quickly discovered that all document changes are tracked and I could easily re-add all of my changes to the document through just a few clicks… crisis averted!

Due to my obvious love for Google Docs, this tool was part of my ‘create’ section of my PLE from week 2, since it’s a tool that I have previously found to be quite helpful prior to this class. I will admit that the full versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint do have some extra features that Google’s online versions do not, however I find one way to solve for this is to get the document as close to done as possible online and then download it into Word or whichever program, make your few minor changes and there you go!

A great video that our professor shared with us this week to watch is an introduction to Google Docs by Stacey Huffine, which can be found here. For someone who has spent quite a bit of time playing around with Google Docs, even I learned a thing or two from the video!

My many uses of Google Docs!
Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016. 

My many uses of Google Docs!
Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016. 

This week’s interesting Feedly find…
This week I read an article on my Twitter feed about how the game show Jeopardy (which I admittedly watch fairly often) will no longer be allowing Canadian contestants on the show – which I found ironic given that the show’s host, Alex Trebek, is Canadian! When searching through Feedly, I found an article about how a Goodman School of Business professor (and Jeopardy champion) is also disappointed in this new restriction. Check out Professor Dolansky’s comments here.

Week 6- Evernotes are forever

This week in ADED 1P32, our tool to explore was Evernote and ‘the cloud.’ I had previously heard of Evernote but had never given it a try, and now I’m seriously wondering why! As a person who really values organization and having easy access to notes and research and lists and essentially having everything all in one place, Evernote is pretty perfect for me. I’m actually disappointed someone hadn’t told me about this tool when I was first starting university but hey, better late than never! A great Introduction to Evernote is presented in slideshow format here.

When exploring Evernote, I noticed how user-friendly and easy the tool was to get acquainted with. I’m not one who likes to spend hours trying to understand something that’s supposed to make my life easier, so Evernote was off to a good start in my books. As I started playing around with it and creating a notebook for the collaborative group project I have coming up in this class, I noticed that when I would copy pages of information from the internet into a new note in my notebook, the URLs actually stayed embedded within the information! Super convenient and super easy.

I see this tool being really useful in my educational activities for lots of reasons. One being the seamless integration between devices – I can user Evernote on my laptop, then pick up where I left off on my iPad and even work on the go by accessing Evernote on my phone. The second reason is that I constantly e-mail myself updated versions of notes or outlines, anything that I’m working on really, because last year, I had the great misfortune of my laptop crashing. Luckily, good old Apple was able to bring it back to life without losing anything but it made me really paranoid. With Evernote, I don’t have to worry about losing things I’m working on because it’s all there in the cloud – hence my ‘Evernotes are forever’ title of this post!

I will definitely be adding Evernote to my PLE. Although it can be classified as both a research and an organizational tool, I personally think it works best under organize because it is not like a search engine type tool where it actually performs the research – it simply organizes and stores what you find.

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…
An interesting and current topic is the one of self-driving cars. The article that came up in my Feedly feed this week is one that states how a self-driving vehicle needs some sort of ‘decision-making’ framework, for lack of better wording. Most consumer products don’t need this to the same level as a car – an out of control phone is an out of control phone; an out of control car is basically a weapon. As someone who’s on the fence about how they feel about the thought of being in a self-driving car, or being on the road with them, it’s definitely an interesting read found in the Globe this week – check it out! 

Week 5- Tweeting on Twitter

I was super excited for this week because Twitter is one of my favourite forms of social media – I already use it on a daily basis, and find it really useful! I decided for my own educational benefit, I would create a brand new Twitter account simply because my more personal account I have had since grade 11, and although it definitely has been beneficial to my PLN, I wanted to give myself the opportunity for a fresh start with a more educational purpose in mind.

As I explored Twitter, I learned things about it that, as a fairly avid user, I  was surprised I did not already know. I learned about the discussions that take place on Twitter on a regular basis that anyone can participate in and read just by the use of a chat-designated hashtag. This is really cool not only from an educational standpoint, but from a personal standpoint too since I can take part in conversations about interests I may have. Since I’m in a Business degree and will soon be joining the business work-world, various discussions on topics like marketing, consumer behaviour or world economies on Twitter will be very beneficial for me to take part in.

With that being said, I definitely think Twitter is useful for educational activities. It is easy to search topics and hashtags and have lots of relevant information be at your fingertips in seconds. Twitter is also more or less my daily newspaper. I follow various news accounts that help me stay up to date on both a local and global level with just a few quick scrolls of my twitter feed during my breakfast every morning!

Since Twitter has already been such a valuable tool to me, it is already part of my PLE. In my week two reflection post, I included Twitter under the ‘collaborate/connect’ section of my PLE, however, I have come to realize that it could also be included under my ‘research’ section as well – it really is a multifunctional tool!

This week’s lesson on PLN’s and the use of Twitter has allowed me to further understand digital literacy and digital citizenship in the sense that you get out of it what you put in to it. By this I mean the more you contribute digitally and understand the use of different tools, the more you will reap the benefits. Since Twitter is an example of a tool I regularly put effort into, I see the rewards in the greater wealth of general knowledge I possess just from scrolling through Twitter.

If you’re not already a Twitter user, I strongly suggest you check out this Anatomy of Twitter Lingo article and sign up for an account!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

This week when I opened up my Feedly reader, I was immediately drawn to an article called How High Are the Standards. It discussed a little bit about how students are held to such ‘high standards’ and teachers have such high expectations, but the term high standards is actually pretty meaningless – what exactly are ‘high standards’? The article suggests that students all strive to achieve more and head in the direction towards a single point, but how do we really know when we’ve gotten there? 

Peter Greene suggests within his article that yes we should obviously demonstrate to students that they should always try to be the best they can be (I have heard this countless times during my career as a student and I definitely agree that we should all strive to reach this) but setting ‘high standards’ that have no true meaning doesn’t help anyone get anywhere. Great read!!

Week 4- Curating Doesn’t Just Happen in Museums

This week I discovered I’m clearly not as ‘internet-savvy’ as I thought I was. Until this week’s lesson I had never heard of bookmarking tools and the only curating tool I had heard of (but never used) was Google Alerts!

The thing I like most about Diigo, the bookmarking tool I decided to try out, is that I can bookmark URLs from sites I had found at home for various school assignments and projects, and then access them anytime from any device by simply logging into my Diigo account. As a student, this is a really useful online tool to have. Especially if you’re like me and have accidentally lost or deleted various bookmarked pages that I keep saved in my own web browser.

This week I also set up two web curating tools: Storify and Google Alerts. Curating tools gather and organize online content about a certain topic. The reason I set up both of these is because when I was playing around with Storify and getting used to the layout, I realized that I didn’t really like it when being used in a more academic sense. I found Storify to be really fun to put together some magazine-looking information on a few of my general interests or hobbies, but setting up a Google Alert so that information on a certain topic comes straight to my e-mail inbox seems like the much more efficient way to do school-related research, at least from my perspective!

Both bookmarking and curating tools help me to further my journey in becoming a responsible digital citizen and gaining digital literacy because they help me with online organization as well as finding the most relevant, accurate information. An added bonus is that Diigo (the bookmarking tool I used) even lets you highlight and add sticky notes to your bookmarked pages! I found the sticky note tool really helpful because when I’m reading something, I almost always have ideas about where I can put the information to use, and then forget where I meant to use it. With the sticky notes, I can mark the information and never forget!

This week, I also learned about the TRASH test, which I found really useful to refresh my memory on how to spot the most accurate web results possible – something really important to a university student and a responsible digital citizen!

I've added a few more new tools to my PLE! Diigo is definitely an organizational tool, which was one of the areas I really wanted to find new resources in when I first created my PLE two weeks ago! Storify and Google alerts both fall under the research category in my PLE.

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

This week when I opened up my Feedly reader, I saw a post that featured a fellow Goodman School of Business student. It speaks about how he is the first Brock University student to obtain a spot in Canada’s The Next 36 – a prestigious program that aims to support young entrepreneurs in all aspects from mentoring to raising capital. Reading this article made me super proud to be a part of the Goodman School, as it clearly demonstrates the great talent we have and the great name we are building for ourselves both province and nationwide. Give the article a quick read to learn a bit more! 

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2013.

Week 3- Reporting and reflecting on my brand new RSS feed!

In my previous post, I shared an article from my RSS feed called The Wisdom of Stupid Questions and a little bit of background information on it – it really is a great, short read!

This article informed my own learning in two ways: the first being that since I am a business student, this article was of great interest and relevance to me because it revolved around the concept of “buyer beware.” The second way is because it immediately demonstrated to me the value and benefits of an RSS feed – this post came straight to me, I did not spend hours searching for it.

RSS feed readers contribute a lot to my work in building knowledge about digital literacy, responsibility and citizenship. They certainly contribute to digital literacy in the sense that I learned a new way to make an online tool work for me since RSS feeds make information from various blogs and articles available by the simple click of an ‘add to reading list’ button!

As far as digital responsibility and citizenship are concerned, it is kind of cool to know that as I subscribe to and follow various blogs through my reader and learn about the things people have to say, people can also subscribe to my very own blog and hear from me as well! It can be seen as a sort of give and take environment – I learn and use information from others, and they learn and use information from me, in a digitally responsible way, of course!  

I would categorize RSS feed readers as very useful tools!! As part of my own personal PLE, which can be seen in my week 2 report and reflection post, I would add my new RSS feed, I use Feedly, to the ‘research’ category. I would add it here because as mentioned in an Educase 7 things you should know about RSS article, and RSS feed is the perfect way to organize and stream all of the content that exists on the internet. When researching a topic, it makes it so much easier to search for blogs or things to follow that are relevant to your topic, and then have all the information on that topic come straight to you in your feed!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.