Week 28: Activity 4: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice.

Week 28: Activity 4: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice.

“As teachers, we respect our trusted position in society and recognise the influence we have on learners, their understanding of the world and the future wellbeing of our society” Education Council (2015).

What?

In my class my students have the privilege of using chromebooks in class to help them research and understand more about what they are learning. One of my students at the time was doing his work and all of a sudden inappropriate content was displayed on his screen. At the time of this incident the student decided not to inform me straight away about this incident, but instead show his peers what had come up on his screen. I definitely had a feeling something was going on so I approached the group of boys and confirmed with them that inappropriate content had appeared on the screen. At the time I was feeling a bit disappointed because what could had been resolved by one student could of saved the other students from seeing this sort of content. Immediately I started processing this situation in my head and starting thinking about how this situation could be handled.

So what?

As the classroom teacher I had to find out myself what are the steps I need to take in order to ensure that this incident in handled in the most effective way possible. A Lot of scenarios where replaying in my mind “what if the students starting talking about this to their parents? “ because many students saw this would I get put on notice? Most important how are my students feeling emotionally and mentally? These are the sorts of questions that were playing on my mind.  I was so caught up in using chromebooks for their learning because I knew that this will ensure positive interaction and engagement for learning. I really did not anticipate this happening but I needed to find out what to do. I advised my management team and together we discussed the best way possible in handling this situation. Ministry of Education (2015) talk about the overall objective for schools is to create a learning environment involving the safe and responsible use of digital technology. This was our original mindset when taking on the use of digital devices to ensure that all students are being safe when using the internet and making sure our students know what this looks like.

Working in a school organisation comes with very important responsibilities and to help teachers and professionals carry out these responsibilities we have our professional standards guide which informs us of our professional ethics.

Professional Ethics:  our professional ethics are guided by the Professional Responsibility and Standard for the Teaching professional – Our Code, Our Standards

2.     Commitment to Learners

3.     Commitment to families and whanau

4.     Commitment to society

School Values;

Our school have really strong values that we want our students to live in our school grounds and also carry with them when they leave us to fulfil their futures. Whakawhanaungatanga in one of our school values which mean building those strong and positive relationships with our families but most importantly our students. Where students are looking out for each other and really promoting what family really means. We deliberately try our best to get to know the students and understand what they bring to education.

Ako is another strong value that we strongly believe where the educator is also learning from the student and where educators' practices are informed by the latest research and are both deliberate and reflective on a regular basis.

Now What?

Understanding our school values and deliberately reminding students of these values and that these values always play a significant part in our lives even when using digital devices. Our context of learning changes where we deliberately focused on learning how to be a digital citizen. What does this look like? Why is this important? And how do we know we are being effective digital citizens. I thought instead of taking away the chromebooks for good we educate and inform our students on how to be a responsible digital citizen on devices. This way they are able to make well informed decision for themselves rather than the teacher telling them what choices to make.

We clearly advised our students of the consequences if anyone decides to deliberately access inappropriate content online.

We have also been introduced to an new management application called Hapara and this has made our responsibility to ensure student safety is monitored throughout classroom interaction. This application allows me to access all opened tabs, emails, shared documents students display on the screens. You can simply say that I can now see everything my students are working on.

Reference List.

Education Council. (2017). Our Code Our Standards.Retrieved from: https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/Our%20Code%20Our%20Standards%20web%20booklet%20FINAL.pdf

Ehrich, L. C. , Kimber M., Millwater, J. & Cranston, N. (2011). Ethical dilemmas: a model to understand teacher practice, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 17:2, 173-185, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2011.539794

Ministry of Education. (2015).DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Safe and responsible use in schools. Wellington: New Zealand: Author. Retrieved from https://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/School/Managing-and-supporting-students/DigitalTechnologySafeAndResponsibleUseInSchs.pdf