EdTech Reflections – Page 2 – Rick’s Knowledge Collection

Blog 1

Week 2

Today we reviewed the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) and reviewed some open-source resources available to teachers. I’ll link to the entire document and some of the resources at the end of this blog post. My biggest takeaway from FIPPA is that, as educators, we must be very cognitive of how we have our students engage with information-sharing platforms from Google to Facebook and all the apps/programs encompassed under those tech giants. Many of these companies, programs, and apps share and host outside of the protection of FIPPA. For example, If the information is stored on a server outside of Canada, it is not protected by Canadian law and could be used in ways that the user may not have realized they consented to. Additionally, it is in poor form to have it necessary to have the students sign up for one of these online services such as Instagram, Google, or Tiktok. A lot of what we went over struck me as common sense. As in, don’t post pictures of other people without asking first. However, the more subtle way you could get in trouble is posting necessary-for-class information on any service that requires login. I’m sure that as an educator, It’s easy to get caught up in trying to make whatever process you are using as easy and streamlined as possible. However, we must keep a careful eye on where the services store the information that we use in our classrooms.

Secondly, we reviewed free-use, copyrighted resources, and proper attribution. Educators, strangely, have a relative amount of freedom when it comes to sharing in the classroom. As long as we share for educational purposes and not profiting, we can share a fairly decent portion of copyrighted material in class. The limits seem to be placed around how much we share. Where it is ok to share a part of copyrighted material, we are not to duplicate the material in its entirety i.e. a few pages of a book as opposed to the whole book. I’ll link the fair dealing tool to the bottom as well with the rest of the links. One other thing that struck me was I hadn’t realized that anything you create is copyrighted automatically unless you explicitly state otherwise or host it on specific platforms as stated above. It makes me feel safe knowing that strangers cannot replicate all the emo poetry I wrote as a teenager for profits without due process.

Finally, we went over a list of image hosting sights and curriculum building resources that we can use when formulating lesson plans or constructing digital materials for use in the class. The endnote I’ll leave on is, it is good to leave proper attribution to the sources that we collect those images and materials that are free to use