As a few of my former posts reveal, I’m trying to find a balance between helping my students take advantage of online technologies on the one hand, and ensuring their safety and our compliance with district guidelines on the other. (And apparently I’m not the only one, though Wesley Freyer takes things a step further and offers great suggestions.)

To help me, I thought I’d try to make a simple classification system, in broad terms, that defines three levels of safety: high, medium, and low.

High Level of Safety

• Completely “walled garden” where all student interaction is monitored, occurs on a school-affiliated website, and is not open to the public.
• Any podcasts, videos, or images are also hosted only on this site and require approval before uploading.
• A single class blog, forum, and wiki, all linked to a student account and inaccessible by any public visitors.
• Students are not encouraged to read blogs, keep an aggregator, or access/use sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Google Docs, and the like.

Medium Level of Safety

• All interaction is monitored, occurs on a school-affiliated website or service designed for educational purposes (elggspaces, learnerblogs, ClassBlogmeiter, etc.), and some sections are open to public viewing, but not interaction (no way for visitors to leave comments, etc.)
• Students create and upload podcasts, videos, and images to the school site, but prior approval is not required and can be viewed by the public.
• Class blog and individual student blogs, forums, and wikis are all linked to a student account and are accessible by public visitors, but no interaction is permitted.
• Students read blogs selected by the teacher and learn to find and cite resources through Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, and the like.

Low Level of Safety

• All interaction is monitored, but may occur mainly or exclusively on open-source services (though likely those designed for educational purposes). All sections are public and open to interaction.
• Students create and upload podcasts, videos, and images to open-source services and link or embed them in their own blogs, wiki, or forum.
• Class blog and individual student blogs, forums, and wikis that students modify and determine access levels on a post-by-post/page-by-page basis.
• Students read blogs selected by the teacher, as well as those related to their interests and research. Students also access and use services such as Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Google Docs, and the like.

In my mind, the benefits the technology offers increases as the level of security decreases, but that is a definite trade-off. Perhaps part of the problem relates to age. It seems to me that a high level of security is appropriate for elementary and perhaps even middle-school students, medium level for late middle-school or early high school, and low level for late high school students.

If this is true, then a blanket AUP regulation may not be the best solution, but instead one that is graduated based on student age and experience.

Teachers should always be trained in and knowledgeable about the technology they’re using with their students, and the level of openness should only be as great as that teacher’s level of comfort.

This creates a system that moves students across this spectrum as both teachers and students gain the knowledge and skills necessary to work safely in more open environments.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach? Would you modify the items in any of the levels? What problems with implementing this approach can you predict? What else am I missing?

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