Sign New York Permission Slip Safe

Document type sign permission slip new york safe

hi there the problem for this hack is how do you set up the google apps for edu suite in a way that protects student privacy and follows all the federal regulations that are associated with running a school and protecting student information and Privacy & safety so we're going to explore this but should be clear that I'm not a lawyer I just did a fair amount of research looking into this and looked at different opinions that talked to in some cases talked to a couple lawyers and arrived at what I think is a helpful compromise between what are some fairly strict interpretations that date back 10 or 15 years and what we hope is going to be a place where schools take the lead in developing good policy so let's start by looking at what Oregon has Don Oregon State actually entered into a contract with Google and would say if it is actually offering apps domains to all their districts in the state and one of the things they're requiring is that all students with accounts have to have a signed consent form on file with the school district so if you wanted to dig in and actually do your own research oregon virtual school districts site has some great resources on how they went about setting this up but just start going through and looking at a few of the concerns that one would need to address and look at the way org and address them the first is kind of a big bucket deals with privacy of minors and the federal law that relates to that is called Coppa or the Children's Online Protection our Privacy Protection Act and it applies really only two kids under 13 and only in the context of their use of commercial websites so this is a fairly easy requirement to meet because Google explicitly does not use any student information for commercial purposes in its platform so therefore we can get around kapa as long as we're using apps for ED you if you add students signing up for regular gmail accounts you would not be satisfying this criteria so it also states in the permission form that they gives parents that the school is able to act as an agent for the parents if during the context of information collection so that's another way to handle this and I'll provide the language of this permission slip so that folks can copy it and use it if they want so really the concrete step to take here and satisfying coppa is that if you want to provide student accounts use a permission slip based on oregon's template make it part of your school's intake process and this is especially true if you're running an elementary or middle school and providing student accounts so that's one dimension another dimension of concern that one would be concerned interested in solving is how do you protect minors from harmful content and people if you're giving them full powered email accounts and there's a law related to this called sepa which is the children's Internet Protection Act of 2001 and sepa applies only to schools that get federal FCC funding for their equipment discount and this is actually virtually all school districts so if you're a public school sefa applies directly to you most likely and either way it's a good idea probably to do something particularly with younger students and so the school is required by sepa to have technology measures and policies ie an Internet acceptable use policy which is why you see schools doing this and it has to protect students from harmful materials including obscenity and pornography so in the case of Oregon this is language from their permission slip this means that student email is filtered now containing harmful content will be blocked how do they do this well they use what's called postini message security which is a an integrated part of the Google Apps for edu sweet and is free and this is what the control panel for it looks like at a base level and you can see that sexually explicit rich quick special offers racially insensitive any of those categories currently are set with a multiplier so that they are are strictly blocked and this is a this would be considered a reasonable measure to take two to help protect students from from this kind of content the second thing you have to consider is what about students sending inappropriate content to one another or using hate hateful language with one another in particular in the docs and chat side of the equation because Postini only filters email and so if you enable chat on your domain you may be opening yourself up and and so there's a workaround and that is presumably while the students in school there's the ability for a teacher to closely monitor what they're doing and if anything inappropriate is happening it can it can be reported to the teacher converse conversely at home you can make the parent responsible through your internet acceptable use policy and through this permission slip so the state of Oregon includes this clause that says by doing so I agree to enforce acceptable use when my child is off district property and so this this sort of covers you in case that some of your services are not blocked by filters it nevertheless it makes clear the family is responsible so concrete steps to take make sure you've enabled postini message security it does not come automatically installed you've got to take an extra step to install it so have your IT people look into it make sure that it's been installed make sure that any large email groups that you have are set as announcement only so depending on who set up your list serves you can be very handy but if they're set up as lists that anyone can send to anything that does get through the filter or that a student wants to send as a prank can end up hitting all your students which is a real disruptive event so make sure that they're set up as announcement only so that only list owners can send to them ensure that your internet acceptable use policy includes the mention of parent responsibilities already talked about this and there's a great product on the market it's part of the google apps marketplace called teacher dashboard we've got a couple schools trying it this year fairly affordable but it's a in addition to being very a very handy way to organize school-wide documents it gives teachers and admins as much view as you want into any student doc email or web facing content like blogs so it gives you a lot more ability to to comply with sepa and and also just to be effective with kids so check that out so a third major concern that one would have to deal with is is this idea of the confidentiality and the ability for access of educational records so you've got a legal responsibility to make sure that information is safe and also accessible to the right people and this is defined in FERPA the Federal Education rights and Privacy Act and I'm not going to read all this but essentially this is language from the Oregon release form and it has to do with defining what is considered confidential because defining what directory information is which is actually information about students that can be made public without any any signed consent it also deals with the right to investigate so if a child's parent requests that they can go into their email account or their docs it says that they have the right to do so so defining an educational record FERPA defines it pretty broadly so it's it's anything directly related to a student any information recorded in any way that's about a student including but not limited to handwriting print etc and so this would presumably include any gmail or docs in particular written by faculty about students or particular any spreadsheets or forms that you might be using to collect information or logs about students and so that's in contrast I think to what we need to understand to be student work and student work in a very generous interpretation of FERPA could be considered part of the educational record as long as the school keeps it but schools in general don't make a habit of keeping for example student notebooks so there's a there needs to be a sliding standard here for sort of what constitutes a core part of the students record and obviously a student's Google Docs would not be something that falls into that category Chancellor's regulations in New York City Department of Ed actually tell us something slightly different they use the word student records and actually say that we have an obligation to keep them for at least 10 years after the student has graduated and we need to be clear here that this is not a reference to all student work it's a reference to all the key data points and presumably the the file that might sit in an office on a student so bearing that in mind there's also the requirement in the Chancellor's regs that you have to protect the confidentiality of those records that this is really just a reiteration of FERPA how do we do so well one way is in your docs settings so if you are keeping some amount of student data in Google Docs you want to make sure that you're aware of what the sharing settings are on the domain so this is in the in the Google control panel so you need to make a decision about whether you want to allow users to share outside the domain and the the blue box would be the more secure of the two settings here the red box shows the one that's that's higher risk it's sort of up to you to decide how much risk you want to take the downside of going with the blue is that users can't actually share across gmail accounts and a lot of teachers have private gmail accounts a lot of collaborators that might not be part of your faculty that can't be shared in on documents it also means though that the students can't publish their their docs in a way that the public can see it which if you're using student portfolios and whatnot you might want to be able to have public facing work so you need to make a decision here again the blue is the safer of the two and the last big concern that I think probably ought to be caused the most concern for teachers in particular is that if and when accusations of impropriety on the part of a teacher are made by students there's a need for being able to dig up that evidence and either protective teacher or do what's necessary to discipline a teacher or to discipline a student and and so how do we make sure that there's easy access when when that kind of thing occurs and these are the steps that I recommend for both dealing with FERPA and for dealing with this last concern about investigations so start by making sure that you have a clear policy in your staff handbook reiterating the definition of a student record as exists in FERPA and make sure that they understand that anything they write in your online systems thats related to students is something that a parent could request access to so you want to be sparing about what it is that you're actually recording you also want to have faculty add a confidentiality clause in their email footer so email doesn't get forwarded that contains sensitive student information and this is a way to cover it and assign responsibility to whoever actually leaked the information rather than the organization you want to ensure that the student records are create that are created or captured in google docs are ultimately logged in in some other system at this point there's not a real reliable way to to do long-term archiving of Google Docs and so you either want to download them and and keep them in some kind of a redundant ly backed up system or just make sure that they're in the do e system and let let your school district worry about the archiving of those lastly there is a product on the market again through Postini that can be plugged into your google domain and with an educational discount at sixteen dollars a year this would be and this is something that does message discovery so you can actually archive and very easily find all emails on every single account that has this turned on for up to ten years and I would recommend doing this just on faculty I think if it were done on student accounts be prohibitively expensive and finally if you wanted to be adventuresome there's a cheap solution that would involve getting a cloud server and using Amazon storage it's very very cheap but you need to dig into the technical know-how and this is pretty difficult but to set up an outbound email gateway which basically takes every single email that's sent from from a user in your domain and archives it in a folder on that server so that is possible and I'll include a link to those instructions but basically if you if you do all the things that I've recommended in this video you should be a lot further along and making sure that if things ever do get ugly everyone's covered legally