Online Safety
Duty of care is taken very seriously in oz-Teachernet projects.
In Land Yachts and Ice Yachts, we have established a system of permissions which allow only known and authorised people to have access to information such as student's names.
- There are top level access rights to the whole site and these are held by five people, the managers of the oz-TeacherNet, Margaret Lloyd, Shaun Nykvist and Jenny Masters, and the programmers we have employed, James Iseppi and Nathan Craike.
- There are project management rights and for Land Yachts and Ice Yachts. In Australia, these are held by Vinesh Chandra and Ken Garrad, both lecturers at QUT and Land Yachts project coordinators. In Norway, access rights are held by Dr Dag Alte Lysne, from Finnmark University College. .
Teachers who have registered teams in the project have also been given permission to view and edit the pages related to their teams. Teachers will also need to comply with the Acceptable Internet Usage rules of their school or school system and to ensure they have the necessary parental permissions. A further requirement is ethical and relates to monitoring the comments which students make in the blogs. There is the opportunity here for the authentic teaching of Net Etiquette and breaches of courtesy should be treated proactively as "teaching moments."
We make every endeavour to ensure students' safety and privacy. An example of this is the naming of the teams - the entry of first and last names is for school and top level reference only and will not be visible to the public or to other registered teams. To see what other participating teachers/schools will see of your team pages, visit the pages for another school. You can enter students by numbers or other identifiers, perhaps related to the name of their Land Yacht or Ice Yacht if you prefer or if this is in line with your school/system's policy.
There is restricted public access to the site and to see this, visit the pages without following the Log In procedures. Individuals who are registered with the oz-Teachernet site have a slightly different view of the pages but do not, for instance, see the teams listings.
The photographs and videos you upload do not need to include images of the children. The focus of this project is on the design of the land yacht and the tracking of experiments. It is about the social construction of knowledge related to this design. While student self esteem is an affective outcome, it is not the prime intention of this project and the images you select for the Internet should reflect this. What you display in your own classrooms might be very different and show the more collaborative aspects of this activity.
Please direct any concerns you have about student safety to Margaret Lloyd, at QUT or raise the matter to the teacher's email list for your project. No concern is trivial and we appreciate your feedback in this.
Last Modified: 07:06:48 Sunday, 28 October, 2007
