Week 29: Influence of Law and Ethics on Professional Practice

Three years ago some teachers in our organisation wanted to create blogs on the learning that was happening in their kindergarten and share these with parents.  As a large organisation, 70 kindergartens, our leadership was rightfully cautious of increasing the online presence and aware of the potential harm that could be caused for children, teachers and the organisation as a whole if an online presence was not handled in the safest possible way.  Understanding the teaching and learning reasons that teachers behind the teachers desire I put a proposal to the Chief Executive that we trial e-portfolio systems.  This was accepted and I began a trial with 6 kindergartens of three different platforms.  Aware of our ethical commitments particularly the principle of responsible care (Education Council, 2015), protection of the confidentiality of information about learners, and to involve parents on the decision-making about children's education the trial included a review of the organisations cyber-safety policies and procedures and attendance at cyber-safety training.

At the end of the trial it was decided that the organisation would implement e-portfolios and specifically the educa platform.  Parents are given information about the system and signed permissions are required before their child is put on the system.  The system is a secure password protected one with only the parent and any whānau they invite able to see the written assessments on the child's page.  There are pages available that all parents and whānau with site rights can see that contain community posts, newsletters and the organisation's policies.

Whilst we have done everything we can to ensure the safety of the children there is always the possibility that parents may take a photo from their child's assessment and put this up in another digital space.  Children's assessments have a number of photos in them and as children learn collaboratively with and alongside their peers there are sometimes other children in some of the photos.  So how do we minimise or better still eliminate the occurrence of this?  This is a question teachers ask when they are undertaking training to implement the system in their kindergarten, and rightly so.  Each story has a reminder at the bottom of that photos are not to be shared elsewhere and the form parents sign when they join the system has this on it to.  Teachers have to be vigilant and if it comes to their attention that a photo has gone up on a social networking site such as facebook they are to immediately approach the parent and request this is taken down.  I am pleased to say that over the last three years and with seventy kindergartens now on the system we have not had one instance of this happening.  It has, however, happened on a couple of occasions when parents have taken photos at their child's birthday celebration at kindergarten and posted these on facebook.  Although it is an uncomfortable conversation teachers have requested that the photos be removed and parents have complied with these requests.

It is never too early to begin teaching children about safety in the digital world.  This certainly fits in with our ethical commitment to promoting emotional and social well-being of learners (Educational Council, 2015).  In kindergartens we have cameras that children can use and a good practice to teach the children is to ask permission from a person before you take their photo.  Reciprocally as teachers we should also model this.  Young children are accessing the internet through computers, tablets and smart phones so beginning to show them the cartoons that are part of the Hector's World programme will begin to teach them about cyber-safety in a fun and understandable way (Netsafe, 2016).

References:

Education Council, 2015  Code of ethics for certified teachers.

Netsafe, 2016  Hector's world safety information island. Sourced from: http://hectorsworld.netsafe.org.nz/teachers/hectors-world-safety-button/, 12/06/16