Activity 5: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice (Week 29)
Activity 5: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice (Week 29)
We have a current issue. Our school has had class blogs for about 7 years and have posted photos of children on these blogs regularly. We don’t post children’s name and parents have signed an agreement to have their child’s photos online. Some don’t agree, and we are extremely careful not to include their photos. Anyone can see the blog’s, they can be accessed through the website or a simple search can find them. Now we have a school facebook account. When it first began parents would take photos of children, mainly their own with others in the background, and put on facebook and tag to the school site. They have no permission from other parents and are not aware of the ones that don’t give permission.
We have no control over what goes on faceook. This was hotly discussed before opening a facebook account. When brought to the attention of the parents. Only discovered because some teachers are “friends on FB” with some parents”. They were shocked at why we would be concerned. We are close knit community with a very friendly open culture. The parent stakeholders felt we were being overprotective and over-reacting. They simply could not (do not) see our point of view. Our issues are that children’s names were mentioned, the parents involved might not be facebook users and haven’t given consent for their child to be on facebook, we have no control over the comments that people leave, people, unknown to anyone has access then to photos and parent profiles.
Their perspective, is that they wanted to share successes with family and friends through this networking site.
As a staff we brought the attention of this potential problem to the board. The board, supported us and we have made a blanket rule of no photos of other children are to be posted on any social media by parents. Staff only are able to do this, we don’t use full names and we don’t post the exclusion families children. We have this as a policy now, it is on our SAP/SOP plans and this plan (verbally and written) given to parents on every event. We have only had one parent disobey this policy so far. The Principal had stern (kind) words with them and they apologised profusely.
I feel we have been proactive with this problem. We stopped it before it got worse and we have changed our policy regarding the situation. We continue to monitor the situation. We have undertaken PD in online ethics and all maintain professional presence online at all times.
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