Panel-style discussion about security and classroom use of web tools (PBWiki). Speakers emphasize teaching digital citizenship before giving students access, creating a safe sandbox to let students learn pitfalls (unkind posts), and using PBWiki features (password protection, permission tiers, page history, timestamps) plus requiring named accounts to track edits.
Security is a big issue for education, and right now we're finding ourselves in an interesting era in education and the digital world. Teachers have to be able to, like, turn their back and trust their class and hope that they're going to do the right thing without looking.
One of the things that you need to do before you ever engage your students in this kind of activity is you need to kind of go through some digital citizenship things and what is and what is not appropriate. Not saying that this is right and this is wrong, but that there's varying degrees of things and that students need to make value judgments as they look at different things via copyright, et cetera.
At this age level, they haven't used these tools yet, but they are going to use them really soon. And so I'm interested in giving the kids a safe place to try out these tools and to see what they can be used for so that when they are then becoming more independent and using tools like this on their own in middle school and high school, they've already maybe gone through some of the pitfalls you can have with a tool like this, where people post stuff up that's not kind to each other and have a safe environment in which to process that and talk about it.
You know, the wiki, they have permissions on there, so there's a password, and you get different levels of sophistication for the different packages that PBWiki offers. I know, but I found that just the password protection offers plenty of security.
In class, having the pages or the page history archived, you can now go back through and see who's made what changes. So that in and of itself kind of controls kids from. Okay, well, if I put this on here and if I mandate the kids have to use their own names and that's their user account, I know exactly who put what on the page, and I can look at the history and I can know exactly when it was put on, because everything's timestamped.
Kids are on the web all the time and we want them to be empowered.
