What are the legal considerations of which a teacher must be aware when implementing technologies in the classroom? Explain each consideration and the step(s) you would take in your own classroom to ensure that you do not violate the law.
Based on the textbook, the legal considerations should be emphasized when the technology using in education has the potential to cause illegal harm to the students or the teaching effects. It mainly contains five aspects, including Acceptable Use, ADA compliance law, Student Privacy, Copyright Law, and Software Piracy.
Acceptable Use refers to the behaviors that students should do and should not do when they use school technological devices. For my own classroom, I think the first step is to get clear about what are the exact local policies on Acceptable Use, referred to as AUP in the book. Teachers first become experts of the policy and then aligning teaching philosophy with the policy would be easier. Next, the school administration and teaches should form the consensus to guide their actions, such as eliciting the code of ethics, installing filtering software and parental control on the school devices, such as iPad and other mobile devices. In addition, teachers should be responsible for promoting the Acceptable Use knowledge among the students’ and parents’ community. ADA Compliance, the second legal issue discussed in the book, requires teachers be aware of the students in need and their learning obstacles. In my classroom, no students would be left behind, especially regarding the equal access to course contents. Materials will be presented in several ways such as paper, electronic version, audio clips or video explanations. The key point it to customize the materials for different needs of each single students who has any type of disabilities.
The third issue concerns about student privacy. Before conducting the certain actions, I agree that teachers should first make themselves aware of what kind of information belongs to the category of students’ privacy. There are some policies and statements can offer help such as COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act). According to the policies, sharing students’ information, whether their personal data or grades, are not allowed. We must be careful with the issue since the disclosure of students’ privacy would jeopardize students and even their family. In addition, it’s kind of easy to understand why Copyright Law and Software Piracy are significant legal issues in our field. We have to admit that handling the two, especially the former one, is difficult for adults, let alone the immature students. I agree with the book that teachers’ modeling influence is crucial to the success of copyright training. If the teachers didn’t take it seriously, students would not regard copyright as important. Thus, I will be a good model in using contents from the Internet and teach the students what is fair use and what is the violation of copyright.
▩Chapter Twelve - Question Two:
Technology continues to evolve, becoming more personally responsive, more collaborative, and more individualized in addressing the needs of the learner. This approach of teaching and learning – whether using personal learning environments, MOOCs, or digital badges – will change how teachers use technology to ensure instruction that addresses the unique needs of the learner. How do you think the personalized learning will alter the way you implement technology-centered personalized learning in your classroom? Give at least three examples.
The book provides several advanced technologies for being integrated into education, such as augmented reality, gesture-based multitouch displays, cloud computing and 3D printing. The availability of multi technologies ensures students’ individual needs have a higher possibility to be satisfied compared with 10 years ago. However at the same time, It is quite challenging for instructors to handle the changes in their teaching practices. For me, I would illustrate my thoughts in the following three examples.
Firstly, offering various choices of course contents, here regarding the contents formats instead of contents itself. We have read about different learning styles have strong or weak influences towards the learning effects of students. The advent of massive technologies makes it easier to solve the problem. Teachers should present course materials available on various devices, such as computers, mobile phones, iPad, iPod, E-books, traditional paper-based books, etc. At the same time, the availability of multi-devices accompanies with numerous contents formats, including video, audio, text, graphic and some other new versions. All of these possibilities ensure that learners have their own choices to make, thus the education would be higher customized.
Secondly, providing students with self-paced assessment methods. Students’ learning abilities of different levels require highly customized assessments. Future education has the responsibility to satisfy each single students’ assessment needs thus realize their full learning potentials. Some of the students may finish a chapter earlier and waiting for their peers would only be the wasting of time. Self-paced assessments, designed with various technologies and applications, enable individual learners study at their own pace and check their understandings at the most appropriate time point.
The third aspect altered by the requirements of personalized learning may be the available course resources. Twenty-first century is often referred to as the age of information explosion, especially with the evolve of educational technology, online learning resources are so abundant and meanwhile, are so convenient to reach. Teachers in the future are incumbent on searching for the available resources and presenting them to the students. Students should be encouraged to explore the topic with the available resources to better aware of the topics they are interested in.