Digital Self, ISTE Standard for Educators Citizen 3D
Assignment: Investigate the privacy policies and terms of use of 3-5 web tools that you or your students use. (Hint: look for the site's "Terms of Service" or "Legal.")Write and publish a blog post about what you learned about how your data might be used. Discuss: the age restrictions, if any, on the use of the website; what surprised you or concerned you; what changes you might need to make in your decision-making about the use of apps and websites in your classroom, school, or district.
The 3 web tools I choose to investigate are EdPuzzle, YouTube, and Kami.
EdPuzzle
My initial reason for researching EdPuzzle’s privacy policies and terms of use is because of Jonathan Thomas-Palmer’s plea to use YouTube as opposed to EdPuzzle.
I’ve used EdPuzzle extensively and have copied Jonathon’s EdPuzzle lessons for my class. I appreciated the EdPuzzles greatly, especially for ‘flipping’ my lessons! But when a highly respected educator in the physics education field requested this and then took down his EdPuzzle lessons, I became curious about the EdPuzzle platform itself.
EdPuzzle is consistent with the requirements of COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Policy) and its service is not intended for students under the age of 13. If students are under the age of 13, the school needs to obtain parental consent to use the platform. Teachers and schools in our district have ‘COPPA letters’ requesting consent from parents and informing them of how the digital tools are used. It is upon researching EdPuzzle that I also learned about the Student Privacy Pledge 2020. EdPuzzle committed to this pledge, along with another web tool I researched, Kami.
As I read EdPuzzle’s privacy policies and terms of use, EdPuzzle seems to collect data in order to enhance the EdPuzzle user experience and tools. The data is also shared between the teacher and student (such as grades and viewing of video), but not between students. As far as I can tell, they do not give out personal information to other companies. (Although they do make a point that if a teacher is to integrate EdPuzzle with a third-party service, the information collected by this third-party service is on the third-party service and not on EdPuzzle.)
One of the conditions I found interesting was that EdPuzzle will delete an account if the account has been inactive (not accessed) for 18 months or more. While I think this is great in terms of privacy, I wonder if it is also due to the storage of data on their end.
After researching EdPuzzle’s privacy policies and terms of use, I’ve concluded that I will continue to recommend EdPuzzle to teachers, especially to those who are interested in flipping their instruction. While I understand Jonathan’s point of view, and any aspiring influencers for that matter (especially since a lot of kids wanting to be YouTube stars), EdPuzzle and Jonathan have different end goals and thus, can’t be truly compared. While EdPuzzle does not meet Jonathan’s goal, I do think EdPuzzle provides a safe, digital environment for students to learn and for teachers to monitor feedback. I do appreciate how others have found a workaround/compromise to this problem, by making Google Forms with Jonathan’s physics videos.
YouTube
Naturally, after Jonathan’s plea to use YouTube as opposed to EdPuzzle and then after reading about EdPuzzle’s privacy policies and terms itself, I had to learn about YouTube’s privacy policies and terms. Although I’ve always been aware of YouTube’s collection of personal data, to actually read and see it in print kind of punched me in the stomach, realizing how much data they actually collect and ‘control’ what I see.
YouTube (Google-owned, so it follows Google’s Privacy and Terms) collects some information about your activity. Activity information they may collect include: terms you search for, videos you watch, view and interactions with content and ads, voice and audio information when you use the audio feature, and people with whom you communicate or share content with. A user can control some of the data YouTube collects by managing his/her settings.
Some of this data is used to improve user experience with YouTube. And some of this data can provide specific services to the user, such as recommending the next YouTube video the user might like. While YouTube highlights this as ‘personalized services to you,’ I do fear about ‘pigeon-holing’ a person into similar, limited views instead of broadening their views. While I, as an adult, am conscious of this possibility and intentionally seek out different points of view and think critically about the media in front of me, I wonder if a young student would do this. It’s much easier to click next or to let it autoplay, rather than to search for something else. I do think Google’s digital citizenship program (Be Internet Awesome) addresses this and therefore is proactive about this. But I wonder if parents and families are aware.
Regarding age usage, YouTube states:
“You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service; however, children of all ages may use the Service and YouTube Kids (where available) if enabled by a parent or legal guardian.
Permission by Parent or Guardian
If you are under 18, you represent that you have your parent or guardian’s permission to use the Service. … If you are a parent or legal guardian of a user under the age of 18, by allowing your child to use the Service, you are subject to the terms of this Agreement and responsible for your child’s activity on the Service.”
I find it interesting that of the 3 web tools I researched, YouTube is the only one to mention about kids being over 13, but under the age 18 - how it is the still parent’s or guardian’s responsibility for their child’s activity on YouTube.
Currently, our district does not block YouTube, but if a student uses YouTube inappropriately and not for school, he/she can be banned from YouTube. Parents can also request their child to be blocked from YouTube. While I worry about certain terms and conditions and privacy settings with YouTube, I do not think that YouTube should be blocked. There are a lot of great educational videos on YouTube, such as Jonathan's Flipping Physics videos. Blocking a web tool does not help the learning process because kids will just learn how to get around that firewall. (Similar to how prohibition did not work.) Blocking YouTube also goes against the new age of digital citizenship. When using YouTube, I think it’s important to teach kids about their digital safety and citizenship. To do this, I will recommend to teachers to use Google’s Be Internet Awesome digital citizenship curriculum.
Kami
Our district bought Kami this year for students and teachers to annotate a PDF document. This helps Virtual Campus students to not require a printer at home. I have used Kami before and found it helpful for physics and chemistry worksheets, especially with word problems. I did not and have not had the opportunity to use it to its full potential because I only used the free version. Nevertheless, some teachers in our district rave about it. The reason for wanting to learn more about Kami’s privacy policy and terms and conditions is because some districts have not bought Kami for their teachers due to privacy concerns. So, I wanted to learn more about it and investigate that claim.
Similar to EdPuzzle, Kami is only intended for use of people over the age of 13, except for educational use which comes with an appropriate COIPPA & FERPA-complaint student data privacy policy. Kami has also committed to Student Privacy Pledge 2020. Kami also collects and analyzes data on how the service is used in order to improve and enhance its service.
As a district, we use Google Workspace for Education and Kami works seamlessly with Google Drive. Teachers and students use Google Single-sign-on to access their Kami account. I can see why some school districts may not want to use Kami because when Kami is used with Google Drive, Kami can access the documents in Google Drive. But it does state: “Documents may be uploaded to Kami by users in order to share them with other users for collaborative processing. Kami does not store these files once the sharing process is completed. Annotations made by users are stored on the site in order to display them to other users viewing a shared document, and to display them to the user if the same file is later re-opened.”
To me, it seems that only the annotations are stored with the document, and Kami does not store the actual document itself. It also says:
“Your data is also encrypted at rest on the servers hosted by our services partner Google Cloud Platform, which we selected because of their compliance with COPPA, and their stringent security measures.” And “none of the annotations is shared with any third parties without the teacher or school’s consent.”
In addition to annotating, Kami can be used as a collaborative whiteboard, although in my experience is slower compared to Google Jamboard. This means that it has more sharing capabilities compared to EdPuzzle, in which case the student can share information with another student if they have the same Kami whiteboard or document. A teacher can also share information with the students. Kami mentions in its privacy policy that this sharing exists only if the link is shared. Kami does not intentionally share the shared links with others.
Unlike EdPuzzle, Kami does not actively delete inactive accounts. You can request your Kami account to be deleted by contacting them directly and they will respond to that request within 30 days. I do wonder if that’s another reason why some districts are hesitant to use Kami - because Kami does not actively delete accounts and therefore, store all annotations. I also wonder how much space it takes up on a server. (Although probably not as much as EdPuzzle videos, which may be why Kami is not actively deleting them to make room.)
I did not find any alarming terms and privacy policies with Kami. I will continue to recommend Kami to teachers and encourage our district to continue paying this tool for students and staff on Virtual Campus. Kami encourages a paperless classroom and also has some great accessibility features, such as the dictionary feature and text-to-speech (reading the text out loud to the students and auto-typing the students' audio response).
