The Cloud
Currently I am taking my 9th and 10th MET courses. Through MET I have learned amazingly how to deliver and store information in the Web. Currently I am using: GoogleDocs, GoogleSites, Prezi, Animoto, Glogster, Youtube, Gmail, UBC blogs, Edublogs and Wikispaces. With my students I am currently using Glogster. One of the issues I try to care about is privacy, specially when working with young students. I recommend them not to expose themselves in the content they are publishing and in the way they interact with others (usually we ask them to interact only with the teacher and classmates). Our school has a regulation about the interaction of students through information technologies, so we base on this regulations when assessing their work through these tools. But, despite these issues, one of the usefulness of delivering and storing our students’ works on the Web is that they are public to the whole school community (principals, teachers, parents, etc.), so everyone can see what we are working in and how our students are learning.
Posted in: Week 08: Files in the Cloud
Jim 6:43 pm on October 24, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Yes, student safety and security is so important. It is sometimes so easy to ignore these issues in the bright light of Web 2.0… There seems to be just so much to offer teachers and students there… but there are very real dangers, especially in light of the Patriot Law in the USA that allows government agencies full access to your personal information and data on any server physically located within its borders… Most of the Web 2.0 tools we enjoy in Canada, and in the world, are running on servers located in the USA.
Allie 8:04 pm on October 24, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
on a practical hand, it’s for this reason that UBC no longer allows faculty to communicate with students via (faculty) gmail accounts. on a more theoretical hand, that law quite interestingly entangles the virtual and actual worlds – and demonstrates that there is a geography and a geopolitics to that which we are led to believe is off of the ground (the “cloud.”)
Deb Kim 11:30 am on October 25, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Angela,
I agree with you that we educators should “recommend [our students] not to expose themselves in the content they are publishing and in the way they interact with others”. I like how most of these cloud-based apps allow us to select whether we want to make the contents private or public. I realize that most of my students don’t take these issues seriously when they post up their work. They also don’t realize how much they are exposed to public. Educating our students about security and privacy issues is also very important.
Deb