With each new semester and school year, educators are constantly seeking to determine how they can improve their teaching methods and learning outcomes. And in the past few years, that quest has repeatedly taken the same route: digital technology. Pedagogies like personalized or blended learning have shown promising results. Use of tools such as G Suite for Education by Google, AI-powered platforms, or curricula that direct content to students using deep learning algorithms have begun to change they way students learn. But there’s another aspect of these teaching methods that many parents have found difficult to stomach—they collect student data.

In order to personalize learning, an application needs to know a thing or two about the learner it’s teaching. That means they’ll need to track students’ grades, keep track of areas in which they study and spend the most amount of time, along with countless other metrics.

Many services also collect student data for their own purposes. These companies typically offer their product for free or at a very low cost. The most notorious case would be Google’s G Suite for Education, which at one time used student search behavior to target them with ads. The company is no longer carrying on such practices, but they still collect student data for their own purposes.

Privacy in the Classroom

‘But,’ you might ask, ‘isn’t a student’s data protected under federal law?’

The short answer is, ‘Yes, with a few exceptions.’ Two laws protect student data. The main one is the Family Educational Records Protection Act, or FERPA. This mandates that parents/legal guardians must give consent for third parties to collect student data. After they turn 18, those students themselves must give consent. The second is the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. This law further protects the privacy of learners aged 12 and younger.

Like much legislation that now controls internet use, FERPA went into effect at a time when digital technology was a military initiative. It was signed into law in 1974 by President Gerald Ford and was last revised in 2012. That revision actually decreased protection of students. It is administered by the Department of Education, which has the power to cut funding if it finds a school in violation.

In essence, FERPA raises many instances in which parents must offer signed consent for student education data to exchange hands. But the law also includes several loopholes. The main one, as per 34 CFR 99.21 allows “School officials with legitimate educational interest” to give consent in a parent’s place.

In other words, a school official can give consent to third parties to collect student data if it is done with legit educational interest at heart. As one might imagine, it isn’t too difficult to establish educational value in a given digital tool or technology.

To take the example of Google again, many districts continue to use G Suite for Education without obtaining individual parental consent because a district administrator has already given it in their stead.

Young Learners

It might give parents some comfort to know that COPPA isn’t quite as old as FERPA. It was passed by the Clinton administration in 1998 and is administered by the FTC. While the law does dovetail with FERPA in a few areas, there are still situations in which third parties can collect student data without parental consent. Again like FERPA, many of these instances are reasonable. But some open up some leeway.

For example, parental consent is not required to “provide support for internal operations of your site or service,” according to the FTC. Among other reasons, this can include:

• maintaining or analyzing the functioning of the site,
• performing network communications,
• authenticating users of the site or personalizing content,
• serving contextual ads or frequency capping,

The FCC does state that if  “an operator intends to use or disclose children’s personal information for its own commercial purposes in addition to the provision of services to the school, it will need to obtain parental consent.”

How to Ensure Your Child’s Data Is Safe

It can be a challenge keeping up with all the new technology and digital services used in the classroom. When a new one comes along, however, all it takes is questioning an administrator with some direct language.

According to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, parents and school district administrators should ask the following: “‘Does the operator use or share the information for commercial purposes not related to the provision of the online services requested by the school? For instance, does it use the students’ personal information in connection with online behavioral advertising, or building user profiles for commercial purposes not related to the provision of the online service?’ If the answer to these questions is ‘yes,’ the district ‘cannot consent on behalf of the parent.'”

Cover Image: Taskin Ashiq, Unsplash.

The post How Third Parties Can Collect Student Data Without Parental or Individual Consent appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Many instructors in the field of special needs education have likely heard of virtual reality (VR) and its uses for learners with physical or mental disabilities. But how should it be used? When? And for which groups of learners?

For some companies, that answer is everywhere and anywhere. Last week, the U.K.-based Inclusive Technology announced a new product: Inclusive ClassVr. This technology is a creation of the Inclusive Technology and Avantis Education partnership. Educational three-dimensional computer visual environment was created by virtual reality developers with the aim of expanding the possibilities of cognition of the surrounding world through play and research. The product is marketed for ‘special and early education.’ It’s that kind of language—lacking precision and typically treating special needs education as a catch-all category—that might turn an educator off.

But Inclusive Technology believes virtual reality can be used to bring a class together regardless of their learning ability.

Virtual Reality as a Means of Inclusion in Special Needs Education

“With access to hundreds of curriculum aligned,” the company writes in a statement, “ virtual and augmented reality resources, Inclusive ClassVR has been specifically designed to educate, motivate and raise engagement for students of all ages and abilities.”

Virtual reality certainly has the potential to bring entire classes together in an environment in which they might not be able to go otherwise. Numerous schools have begun to use VR to take field trips to places where those with physical disabilities would struggle to access.

And according to Megan Rierdon, a special needs educator at the 53rd St. School in Milwaukee, leaving the classroom is difficult for learners who experience social anxiety in one form or another.

“Going on field trips can be challenging because of the stress and anxiety for kids with autism of being outside the normal routine, and also because of the cost of special transportation,” she said according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This spring, Rierdon’s students gathered for a field trip to BrightFarms, a company that operates five farms throughout the U.S. In honor of Earth Day, they created a VR experience for schools.

“The kids sat down in a chair, put on a virtual reality headpiece and saw a tour walking around an entire greenhouse. With school budgets being tightened, teachers have to be creative,” Rierdon said. “Virtual reality is a really great opportunity for kids to travel and experience things that they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

“The kids were reaching down to touch the dirt and waving to the people they saw,” Rierdon said. “It was cool that they were cognitively able to connect in the same way they would have had they actually been there.”

Testing Real World Skills in Virtual Environments

For others in special needs education, however, VR has some very specific uses. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan School of Social Work has been exploring the struggle faced by learners with mental disabilities trying to enter the work force for seven years.  The team has developed an AI-powered virtual character named Molly to help learners prepare for the process in a safe environment.

To undergo ‘Molly training,’ learners put on the headset and respond as Molly conducts a 20 minute interview. They then receive scores based on their performance. They believe the training can help applicants who belong to one of five disadvantaged groups. Those include people with severe mental illness, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, and addiction.

“We really want to make the tool accessible and evaluate if this tool can help other groups, too,” associate professor Matt Smith told the Michigan Daily. “At the end of the day, job interviewing is something everybody has to do. Whether you’re somebody with a certain type of disability or whether you’re somebody that has no disability, it causes anxiety. And it’s a skill set that needs practice.”

Testing is still in its early stages, but many participants have doubled their score so far. In the job search following the Molly training, 30% of participants found employment while 20% landed an internship in the four months following the program. That might not sound great, but it definitely marks an improvement, researchers say.

“The Molly training is designed to help people speak more effectively about their ability to work well on a team — that they’re a hard worker,” Smith said. “If they’d had gaps in their work history, it helps them learn how to frame their responses in a positive way.”

Featured Image: Scott Webb, Unsplash.

The post Educators Harness Virtual Reality to Enhance Special Needs Education appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Using VR in the classroom isn’t exactly a walk in the park. But John Zingale, a social studies teacher at Vancouver iTech Preparatory in Vancouver, WA wanted to go a step further. In partnership with the nearby For Vancouver National Historic Site, he and computer science teacher Cindy Hagin have led students through numerous VR-based projects.

Most recently, his class scanned multiple museum artifacts for 3D viewing. Using the app Qlone—which syncs up with Apple’s AR Kit and employs the method of photogrammetry—students were able to translate pictures of the objects into 3D digital images.

“Being a project-based school, we’re more interested in the kids creating the VR,” Zingale said. “That’s what we try to do—make our kids not just consumers of it, but to actually create it.”

FVvr – A Virtual Museum

Dubbed Fort Vancouver Virtual Reality (FVvr), the objects are currently hosted on Sketchfab and can be viewed here. 

But Zingale’s class isn’t just about using new technology. The project-based model was designed to recreate the process of how something like this might look in the real world. When they began working with Fort Vancouver and the National Park Service, neither party knew exactly where the project was going.

“They came in, presented to us, and said, ‘Here’s our problem,’” Zingale said. Fort Vancouver, like most museums, has far more artifacts than they can display at one time.

“They said, ‘Well how can we showcase these artifacts that we can’t put out on display?’ Originally they were thinking that we’d just take some pictures of them. The kids started coming up with some different ideas. We kept beta testing and messing around with a couple different things to see what we could get working, and we just went at it,” Zingale said.

The answer the class and the national park service eventually produced was creating a virtual museum.

“It’s messy, and I think a lot of teachers are scared of that. But that’s where you do a lot of true learning, through those errors. We learned a lot about the programs, how to schedule things. Time management is big for students too. It isn’t easy juggling all that stuff.”

Some Former Students Have Already Found Real-World Uses for the Skills They Learned in Zingale’s Class.

“I had a student two years ago. He showed the technology to his dad, who is in real estate. He went out and bought a Matterport camera and they display all their real estate with that, which now has helped their business. My former student is now running all that stuff for his parents,” Zingale said.

“And that’s what we want our kids to do—not just memorize things but learn how do these things and then apply them outside of the classroom.”

“VR is just a game changer because it gets you out of the textbook. Let’s say that we’re going to study the Coliseum and look at life in ancient Rome. You can only learn so much from a picture. When you put on that device, and you’re standing next to the coliseum and you get the full scale of it, things change.”

“When I do my unit with my sixth graders in world studies called Adaptation, [a unit on climate change], we do one module where we look at how climate change is affecting certain countries in the developing world. We actually visit the streets of Bangladesh. I pull it up on Google Street View, and we have the students stand in the streets. And they can see really clearly that there’s a different level of poverty in those countries than in our country.”

Zingale’s school is much more geared toward this kind of project-based learning than a more traditional institution. The virtual museum with the national park service is part of Washington state education that learners are required to undergo every two years. And in two years’ time, Zingale plans to work with the national park service again.

Creating a Virtual Museum Takes Some Time, Effort, and Creativity

According to Zingale, there are many organizations and businesses who’d love to work with K-12 classrooms. But it’s up to the teacher to get the ball rolling.

“I think more sites want to do [VR or project-based work]. But, you know, they don’t know who to partner with. So I think that’s on the schools and teachers to ask. We do nothing but projects here, and I’m never really told ‘no’ by organizations. They want to work with schools. They just don’t know who to work with or who wants to work with them. And so I think that’s a big thing. It’s up to the teacher and the schools to say, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and then just approaching people. I think both these projects I’ve done with students can be replicated across the country and across the globe.”

“I get told no every now and then [by the district]. But to me, ‘no’ means ‘we can’t do it like that.’ So I figure out a way to make it happen. I dig in my heels. But that’s the problem solving part of me too. I present on this [work] and I try to answer as many questions as possible. A lot of it is, ‘How do you get something like this going?’ And the answer is: the fort and the national park service. There are organizations; there are trusts. The first year we did it, we didn’t pay for it. We had to pay for our bussing up front but then we found there’s a grant through the trust out there. Through working with the fort, they found a way to reimburse us for that. Our PTSA covered the cost of some of the cameras. There are always going to be these little roadblocks. But if you think about it and you plan ahead, you can make it happen.

“These cameras that we bought to do VR, they’re a little pricey. My pitch was, ‘This isn’t just a social studies, it’s not just for this one project. There are other uses for these.’ So it was just showing my colleagues what you can do with these too so that, so when we make an investment in technology like that. It’s not just me asking for it, it’s being able to use it in these other subject areas so we can show the kids that this is something they can do.”

The post ‘Creators, Not Consumers’: How a Washington Middle School Class Scanned a Virtual Museum appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Last month, eLearning Inside news reported on Washington implementing new technology learning standards for their state K-12 education system. Washington educators did not write them. Instead, they adopted the widely acclaimed International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) technology standards. Taking into account the dropping performance of U.S. students based national and international testing, and considering the often-vague nature of ISTE’s standards, we questioned the rigor of the standards. In certain districts and classrooms, it might not be the ideal governing document. But for highly motivated, creative, and up to date tech teachers, it’s a different story.

Benjamin Kelly teaches technology at the Caledonia Regional School near Moncton, New Brunswick. (He was the subject of a previous article about using Minecraft for game-based learning in the classroom.) About seven years ago, he came to a critical point in his career.

“I was doing the traditional tech program. I started to look around and I said, ‘If I’m going to stick out my career in this building, this isn’t good enough for me. The real life changing moment came when I asked ‘How is our little, rural school known? How is it known throughout the province?’ And the answer I got was, ‘We’re a pretty good Division B basketball team.’

(In Canada, high school sports divisions go AAA, AA, A, B.)

“I remember staring at the person and saying, no really, how are we known?”

“I realized at that point that our school needed to be on the map for something more than being a fourth-level basketball team. And I said, let’s try to make our edtech program not only known in the province, but let’s push it.”

“So I got involved in ISTE and the discussion happening on Twitter. So I’m pretty aware of what’s going on in the world right now—not just New Brunswick or Canada, but the world. And so when I come to work in the morning, I’m trying to make my program world-competitive vs. what the district is saying, that I should be at this standard.”

To be clear, New Brunswick doesn’t use ISTE. But Kelly participates in the community and is a huge supporter of the organization’s standards. He also finds himself in a situation where he has wiggle room without them. 

The New Brunswick technology curriculum is designed such that a majority of courses must follow guidelines up to grade 10. Both during and following those lessons, Kelly does what he can to bring in new tech.

Grade 11 and 12 electives “are pretty much 90-minute open slates because the person who created the course didn’t get too specific about what was required,” Kelly said. So you basically walk that line of what the suggested things to do in the course are and you bend them to your will.  So kids in grades 11 and 12 can pretty much do 40 hours of drones. They can switch to Unity, they can do Hololens work, anything they want really.”

New Brunswick’s Provincial Standards Work for Kelly, but they Could Be Better

“They’re not abreast. There’s a guy from the New Brunswick University and he was just heralded and tasked with coming up with NB’s own digital literacy strategy. And the whole time I was reading the article I was like, “Uh, ISTE has standards, and they’re a little more widely accepted.’ So I found it funny. I’m all for this guy doing the work, but there are also plenty of organization with standards already. So why are we recreating the wheel? Why don’t we just look at those and tweak them to suit New Brunswick.”

Canadian Edtech Groups Have Made Significant Contributions

“Our country has some amazing standards being thrown out there by C21 and others,” Kelly said. “ISTE is taking are looking at these standards and taking the best of them and putting them together. ISTE just has the mighty power of their size behind them.”

“If a school has somebody in a technology post who’s not even half as into it as I am, they’re not even looking at standards. They’re still introducing PowerPoint 25 years as the base block to a Grade 9 class. And that’s still happening in our own province. I think the teachers on social media really are starting to get sucked into it with discussions and chats at night, they get shown new things and then they dive into it themselves. But teachers who are just scheduled in—and this is a problem everywhere, teaches who get penciled in because there was no one else to teach technology—they’re doing the bare basics. They’re doing what they think is right, but they’re certainly not taking the time to look up digital literacy standards and they’re certainly not paying the price I’m paying in four weeks to fly to Chicago to attend a conference that charges $700 CAD just for the right to be there.”

“But it is happening. It’s one of those things where the principal says, ‘suck it up for the team, get in there and teach tech.’ And you really have to ask the question: what are the students getting there vs. what are the kids getting here?”

The post ISTE Standards–Which Tend to Be Broad, and Not Prescriptive–Benefit the Motivated Tech Teacher appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Game-based learning has been shown to be a viable educational tool. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to implement. When Benjamin Kelly, a technology teacher at the Caledonia Regional School near Moncton, New Brunswick, tried to get the newest version of Minecraft into his class, he found that out first hand.

“Back in the day, there were pioneers who would head out on the trail long before everyone else would leave,” Kelly said. “I really feel like I’m one of the crew that headed out first and encountered the wilderness. It was chopping down things. It was talking to the department of education and then you talk to the district, and then you talk to someone locally, and then you talk to someone outside at Microsoft. So you have to get all these stories and match them up. And then, nobody seemed to be too concerned with solving the problem. So it landed at my feet. And you have a choice. You can say that’s someone else’s job or you can start solving the problem.”

What It Took to Bring the New Version of Minecraft Into the Classroom

Kelly had been creating Minecraft-based lessons for years. He would publish them on his website. And for years, because of the barriers he faced in his own district, everyone except him could use them in the classroom. But that changed last fall.

“I got hit with all these things–like every parent who has a kid involved has to sign off on a policy document warning them that Microsoft stores student data outside of the country. So I said, where’s that document? There is none. So I had to write it. Again, no help. The district didn’t swoop in and say this is an appropriate document. They basically said you need to do 100% of the red tape cutting and if you get through all these steps, the congratulations, we’ll support it.”

“There were a lot of problems in the early days of Minecraft education,” Kelly said. “Server ports had to be opened. How come this didn’t work? How come my Mac is linked up but it isn’t being seen by the PCs? We went through all of that. And now we come in every day and we do Minecraft-related work. And it’s working. It’s going quite well.”

Kelly knew that if he could make it happen, it was going to be a big deal.

It Wasn’t a Question of If Game-Based Learning Works

“I think we’re lucky enough at this point — you have to be living under a rock to not know what Minecraft is and not know the power it has over kids. If anything, the questions I’m getting are ‘Why do you let them play so much Minecraft?’ Or “Why are kids on Minecraft at school and at home?’”

“One of the greatest comments ever came from one of my own child’s teachers, who said, “I’m not sure if I’m ok with kids playing Minecraft because it’s so engaging, it makes everything else in school less engaging for them.” So you can imagine sitting there as a Minecraft mentor, the biggest smile came over my face. Because the obvious answer is, well, it sounds like someone needs Minecraft in school.”

Kelly is not your average technology teacher. For years, he has adopted new technology into his classroom with the hope of acquainting his students for the world of technology in which they will work. He has taught his students to fly drones, design video games with Unity 3D, use AR and VR in the classroom, and develop mobile apps, among other things.

While it took a lot to get Minecraft in the classroom, he counts himself lucky for two reasons: the IT staff at his school are incredibly supportive, and his administrators allow him to take risks.

“The IT end of things have a real mentality of ‘how can we make this happen.’ From the principal to the top, they are allowing me to take risks, which is one of the greatest gifts you can be given.  Because I’m sure in other districts, everyone’s handcuffed. I’m sure there’s no way of doing anything without going up ladders just to get permission. What administrators are allowing me to do here is do what I think is right, do what I think kids need, and at the end, if it works, fill them in, and if there are hiccups, let them know.

“One of the greatest gifts, to be able to try something and to not worry too much about it failing.”

The post Minecraft Provided Ideal Game-Based Learning for Benjamin Kelly. But to Use It, He Had to Cut Through Some Red Tape. appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Considering the news this month concerning Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, eLearning Inside News recently decided to take another look at an example of data collection in edtech. Google, with their G Suite for Education, is “still doing some data collection and they’re pretty open about it,” said Sophia Cope, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “They’re collecting data for their own purposes to improve their products or just to better understand their users and in general.”

Google isn’t as bad as it once was. They used to target K-12 students with advertisements when they used Google products outside of G Suite and sold their data to advertisers. Still, they currently obtain consent to collect student data in a manner that doesn’t involve direct parent or teacher attention. Some parents voice alarm that they had no option to opt out of G Suite for Education use.

What Comes Along with Checking the Box

For a member of the general public, sufficiently understanding Google’s privacy agreement can be a challenge.

In a page dedicated to privacy in G Suite for Education, the company writes in no uncertain terms, “No. Google doesn’t assume ownership of any customer data in G Suite core services, and it says so in our contracts (under “Intellectual Property”).”

But according to Cope, this doesn’t exactly get to the heart of the issue.

“The ownership is irrelevant, frankly. It’s the fact that the way it’s set up, both architecturally and in terms of their contractual terms, data collection is happening and Google can use that data. If they’re saying the school or the school district owns the data and the school or school district can delete that data at any point in time, well okay, that’s good. But prior to that happening, the data’s being collected. They’re using it, in many instances, not to advance education, but to advance their commercial interests.”

G Suite for Education Has Improved their Data Collection Practices, But Concerns Remain

In 2015, EFF logged a complaint with the FTC along those lines. “We felt like Google’s privacy pledge suggested that they should actually not be collecting data on students for commercial purposes and using that for commercial purposes,” Cope said. “But that appears to be what they continue to do, even though they limited that to some extent by not serving targeted ads to kids.”

When it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had accessed the information of over 50 million American Facebook users, many voiced anger despite the fact that they had actively opted in to the various groups, apps, or extensions the company used to collect their data.

Google’s privacy agreement for their G Suite for Education products, like many, many other privacy agreements, is not easy to follow. In fact, on Google’s site, you can find both the “G Suite for Education Privacy Notice” and a separate page titled “Privacy and Security.”

The case illustrates how convoluted and confusing privacy agreements can be. So much depends on the meaning of a single word. ‘Ownership,’ for example, does not constitute ‘use’ and vice versa.

“The ownership issue is completely irrelevant,” Cope said. “If the Google contracts, both terms of service as well as the education agreement, which is linked above there, allows for data collection used by Google, that’s all that matters. The ownership of the data is irrelevant.”

“The best thing would be that Google would just stop data collection, that they only do the limited amount of data collection to actually provide the educational apps, and that they stop everything else. Because then that would comfort parents who are concerned about the risk to their kids’ privacy. If Google’s not going to do that, we do think that, the law notwithstanding, that schools and school districts should allow parents to either provide consent or opt their children out of the use of those products.”

Cover Image: Sigurd Magnusson, Flickr.

The post Following Google’s G Suite for Education Privacy Agreement Is No Picnic appeared first on eLearningInside News.

This month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress regarding his company’s practices of data collection, among other things. The testimony was ushered in by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica purchased the data of over 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge or explicit consent. This data was then used by the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. The company was also involved in the Brexit vote along with the 2016 campaign of the heavy-handed President of the Philipines, Rodrigo Duterte.

In terms of data collection and privacy, public interest and/or outrage seems to come in waves. In the mid aughts, news emerged that the NSA was collecting data of U.S. citizens en masse. It made a small stir. When Edward Snowden leaked his trove of documents, the lid was completely blown off. After the fallout, things cooled down until this spring.

“I would just say that all of these news headlines are simply indicative that we live in a technology-driven society,” said Sophia Cope, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Many of the products that we use, we can use them for free. Oftentimes when the product or the service is free, that means we’re actually the product. Our data is useful to these companies. And usually that’s because of advertising, but it can also be for other purposes. With Cambridge Analytica, it was for political research purposes and political advertisement.”

Data Collection and Google

In light of the recent happenings, eLearning Inside News has decided to revisit a data collection issue that few know or care about: Google continues to collect the data of K-12 students using some of their products.

“Google [is] offering G-suite education services to schools and school districts for free, or at least at a very low cost,” Cope said. “They also have Chromebooks in schools too which are, of course, directly linked to the Google Cloud.” (Google clears razor thin margins on their Chromebook sales.)

“EFF in 2014 filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Well, the FTC never did anything with our complaint.” Until 2017, that is, when they suddenly held a workshop seeking public comment on Google’s data collection practices in K-12 classrooms.

“We wrote to them in December for their workshop, and we were like, ‘That’s great, you’re doing this workshop two years later, but what happened with our complaint?’ Anyhow, one of our major complaints that time was that students were given these Google accounts, and you can see from a survey that we had done last year that a lot of the time they didn’t even have a choice and parents didn’t have a choice. They didn’t know this was happening.”

“They’re still doing some data collection and they’re pretty open about it. They’re collecting data for their own purposes to improve their products or just to better understand their users and in general. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s just that with students, you know students are minors and a lot of parents don’t want any kind of third party tracking and collecting data on their kids.”

In the meantime, Google has stopped selling student data. But they still collect it for their own purposes.

“They’re still doing some data collection and they’re pretty open about it. They’re collecting data for their own purposes to improve their products or just to better understand their users and in general. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but students are minors and a lot of parents don’t want any kind of third party tracking and collecting data on their kids. And so there’s a real conflict of interest in terms of Google’s commercial [operations] and what is reusable for the education controlled environment. We have heard directly from parents, particularly from our survey, who don’t want any of that happening.”

According to Cope, the laws regarding consent for minors in school systems are complicated and, in many cases, fraught.

The Issue of Consent

“There’s this federal privacy law called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). It applies to any school that accepts federal money. The law requires that if data is going to be collected on students, either by the school itself or some kind of contractor that the school uses, that data collection cannot happen without parental written consent, and so if they don’t get written consent, the data collection cannot happen.”

“But there’s an exception to that rule called the School Official Exception. Basically there are four criteria that have to be met, and if the criteria are met, then a school can provide consent for a contractor to collect data on students, and thus remove the need for parental consent. And so what Google does is, you can see in their standard contracts for G suite for education is they say, “We are a school official,” and therefore they themselves as the company don’t have to go get consent directly from the parents as long as the school district says, “Yes, we want this to happen.”

“We just think that’s wrong as a legal matter, you can’t just deem in a contract that this is the case, the law actually requires that there be an analysis of whether these criteria are met for a school to be able to provide consent in lieu of the parents. Even if there are situations where the verbal requirements are met and technically Google doesn’t have to directly get parental consent for data collection on students through the Google accounts that they’ve set up, we still think as a policy matter, schools should allow parents to opt their children out of using Google.”

Generating interest in data collection matters of public concern is no easy matter. Usually, it takes a high profile event—like the 2016 election—to galvanize interest. For now, no one is standing in the way. It’s unclear where the FTC is at in the process of looking into Google’s practices. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.

The case of Cambridge Analytica and Google in K-12 classrooms might seem like a very different story, but many similarities exist. In a following article, we will look into their privacy agreement, how it has changed, and how it might easily mislead a concerned parent, learner, or teacher.

Image: Robert Scoble, Flickr.

The post In Light of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, Will Anyone Revisit Google’s Data Collection in G Suite for Education? appeared first on eLearningInside News.

If you search ‘personalized learning’ today, you’ll likely find a good deal of thought leadership-type articles on its merits. Even publications as rigorous as The Hechinger Report have unblinkingly praised its merits. There is currently no shortage of educators either trying personalized learning or willing to do so.

But among edtech leaders, some have grown skeptical of its uses and the way it is implemented today. Larry Berger, CEO of Amplify, has recently voiced a sobering argument about its shortcomings. In February, Education Week blogger Rick Hess published his written comments in a post.

“The Map Doesn’t Exist”

His argument and summary of personalized learning, reads, “You start with a map of all the things that kids need to learn.”

“Then you measure the kids so that you can place each kid on the map in just the spot where they know everything behind them, and in front of them is what they should learn next.”

“Then you assemble a vast library of learning objects and ask an algorithm to sort through it to find the optimal learning object for each kid at that particular moment.”

“Then you make each kid use the learning object. [The more kids use it, the smarter and better it gets.]”

“Here’s the problem: The map doesn’t exist, the measurement is impossible, and we have, collectively, built only 5% of the library.”

In April, Hess published a response letter by Joel Rose, CEO of New Classroom Innovation Partners. This week at the ASU + GSV Summit, the two were joined by Nick Gaehde, president of Lexia Learning, Joel Rose, and Phil Regier, a dean at ASU, along with moderator Phyllis Lockett (Leap Innovations co-founder) for a panel discussion on personalized learning.

The ASU + GSV Summit Panel on Personalized Learning

Berger began. From an engineering point of view, he argued, personalized learning seems like a great idea. Classrooms, after all, aren’t great systems. “You’ve got 30 parallel processing kids out there and they each can think about things at different levels,” Berger said. “And you’ve got one transmitter that is not parallel processing capable.” (That would be the teacher.)

“So, the engineer says, this is great. This is something we can fix. We can replace that one transmitter with a range of parallel processing experiences that can solve that network diagram and make it rational. That’s attractive at a structural level. The computer can multitask, the kids need multitasking, let’s put it there.”

“There’s a pedagogical and personal thing that comes along to support that view. A lot of educational research says that one-on-one tutoring is kind of the best thing we have if we want to make a big gain for a kid. There’s nothing that has outperformed that as a teaching model.”

“So if you put those two together—the engineering thing that makes sense, the computer can get close to a one-to-one teaching model, and one-to-one feels right. Our best experiences are sort of like that.”

So personalized learning sounds like it would make a lot of sense. Berger, after all, has skin in this game. Amplify offers personalized learning curriculum and assessment options. But there’s a problem. Few people, according to Berger, have been able to make a personalized model work well.

“What’s going on is not simply the matching of teaching and level; it’s an adult that that student wants to impress and understand, and it’s an adult that’s understanding that kid. So the engineering diagram of personalized learning looks better, but something can get lost in that shuffle.”

Berger was outnumbered by his panelists, who were largely pro-PL. Various familiar responses met his initial comments. Nick Gaehde said, “I think the personalization of the curriculum allows the student to do some things they would never do without it. It allows them to take some risks and as we all know, especially when you’re getting into upper elementary school and middle school, the number one job is ‘don’t get embarrassed.’ So without that technology and 1-1 curriculum, students aren’t going to take those risks without that environment that technology allows for them.”

Many other familiar points followed. For example, personalized learning has shown itself to be very effective in K-8 math and early literacy. But that’s more or less its extent.d

PL is still a very new technology. Many are keen to tout its virtues, but few have been able to display hard results, especially outside of the two areas of education mentioned above.

The post Skepticism of Personalized Learning Is on the Rise appeared first on eLearningInside News.

While some believe that augmented reality will surpass virtual reality as a more useful classroom technology, there’s no denying that both can have a huge impact on learners and the educational process. Both are still relatively new, and the applications for the technology will only grow in the future. VR in the classroom might seem like something way out of your school’s budget, but it’s more realistic than you might think.

VR is being used for everything from gaming to flight simulators to OSHA workplace training. Each of these applications of VR require different hardware which can range in cost. Luckily for educators, most uses of VR in the classroom can make do with the simplest and cheapest offerings on the market today.

Budgets are always a concern with any use of technology in the classroom. This post will explain how, an educator can implement VR in the classroom from between $150 per student to as low as under $10 per student.

Requirement #1: Mobile Device

The most expensive aspect of VR is the device that plays the videos. These days, you can find smartphones for about the price of a meal at a mid-range restaurant. Unfortunately, not every smartphone will be compatible with a VR experience.

Viewing VR has some basic system requirements. For one, the phone needs to have an accelerometer and a gyroscope. The former tracks the device’s tilt and orientation while the latter measures twisting and turning. Both are needed to experience a 360 degree video and look around in every direction.

You’ll also want to maximize screen resolution. Just about every VR headset places the phone just an inch or in front of your eyes. Up that close, you can really tell the difference between standard and high definition. Some say that a 720p resolution is enough for VR in the classroom at least, but 1080p is much, much better.

The device will also need a CPU with enough power to connect to the internet and stream (or in some cases, download) a VR video. Just about every phone that has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and a 720p/1080p minimum resolution will have the processing power for VR.

Prices change all the time, and this article is not sponsored by any company, so we hesitate to recommend one specific phone. As the market changes and new models are released, the price tag for phones with the minimum VR requirements is only going to go down. In doing research for this article, we found devices from Samsung, LG, Motorola, BLU, Huawei, and others that were all under $150 and VR compatible. If you’re buying in bulk, it might be worth getting in touch with a sales manager at your local electronics retailer. If you time it right with new releases, you might be able to negotiate a deal for much less.

Bring Your Own Device

Of course, in classrooms throughout countries both developed and developing, a majority of students already own VR compatible devices. If you can rely on even half your class bringing their smartphones to school, the costs of implementing VR come tumbling down. By surveying students, you can get a better picture for the amount of devices you’ll need.

Headsets Are Cheap

If you search for VR headsets on Amazon, you’ll likely run into the Oculus Rift, which retails for $399, or the HTC Vive, which comes in at $499. These headsets are intended primarily for gaming and include controllers linking your headset to your gaming device. You do not need these to use VR in the classroom.

In fact, basic VR headsets are not by any means advanced technology. They simply include a box that holds a smartphone, lenses that enhance the viewing experience, and a headband to hold it all together.

Google led the way with low-end VR viewers by making one out of recycled cardboard. Many others have since joined in. Google has made their design plans for their viewer public. If you’re feeling really crafty, you can even construct one yourself. Otherwise, you can pick one up for under $10.

Many VR Apps and Content Are Free

The final step for setting up VR in the classroom is the video content. Once you’re all set up with devices and headsets, it’s time to play. To begin, you will need to download a VR viewing app which effectively translates a video into two separate panels (one for each eyeball) and allows you to view just about any 360 degree video. There is already a huge library of 360 degree videos available on YouTube.

In terms of more education-focused content, a good deal of free educational VR apps are available on the Android and Apple stores. Some notable examples include this VR star chart, a program to practice public speaking, and Boulevard, which allows you to virtually travel to several different museums and get as close to the art as you want.

VR can seem like a crazy new technology that requires expensive hardware and expertise to use. That is a myth. Costs per student are low and dropping. If you can count on your learners to bring their own devices, VR in the classroom can be a reality for under $10 per student.

The post Using VR In the Classroom Is Cheaper Than You Think. With BYOD, You Can Make It Happen for Under $10/Student. appeared first on eLearningInside News.

What if the novels you teach or read in class weren’t purely fictional? What if you could follow a protagonist as they journey through their chapters and acts? When Bay Area high school English teacher, Jerome Burg first encountered Google Earth, a lightbulb popped up above his head. He was at an education-oriented conference at Google’s Mountain View campus, and various designers were presenting their creations to discuss whether or not they could have a place in the classroom.

“They were running us through all these presentations in front of a small group of people, telling us what they were doing,” Burg said. “And they had told us when we walked in that they were going to give us an assignment. I was a little taken aback at that. This was long before Docs, Google Drive, and all this stuff. This Google Earth guy came up, and his first slide had a line going across the top of the United States. And I raised my hand and said, ‘What’s that line?’ And he said, ‘Oh that’s the path tool. You can draw lines anywhere you want.’”

“In that second I thought, ‘That’s the project I’m going to do. I’m going to map out literature.’ I was a high school English teacher. I’d taught Grapes of Wrath a million times. I went off immediately and just started playing with Google Earth and creating the place marks of where the Joad family traveled.”

Google Lit Trips Was Born

This idea soon became Google Lit Trips. And it went far beyond merely mapping out the route the Joad’s took West.

“With the place marks, you can add in whatever you want, like text, images or video. There’s this teaching strategy called ‘Just in time teaching.’ (For example, instead of providing 100 vocabulary words before you start reading something, you teach a vocab word in the moment that it’s used. There’s more of a direct connection.)”

“[Steinbeck] will talk about this famous gangster called Baby Face Nelson. Who’s that? Well, you get there in the novel and there’s a link [on the Google Lit Trip] that sends you off to learn about Baby Face. Some people thought he was a Robin Hood type hero, other’s thought he was just a gangster.”

“There’s another scene where the family is working in the field and the grandmother writes up a shopping list. In the book, they had to buy from the company store which was very common in those days. The company store would give you very little and charge you very much. There’s a map point for that which says something like, oh you thought things were cheap back then? Well let’s do the math. It took six men six hours each to get the money to pay for that shopping list. Then we guestimate what it’s worth today. And then you realize if it took those men that much time, they were getting paid just about nothing an hour.”

Burg knew he was really on to something, and so did his colleagues with whom he shared his trips. But it took some time for the idea to spread.

A Free Resource for K-12+ Classes

“When I was building this site, I’d have 10 visitors a day, all of whom were me. And then in a few months, an educational Blogger will Richardson found out about what I was doing. And all of a sudden, there were 450 people visiting. And that wasn’t just me.”

Things took off from there, Burg landed a fellowship. He started receiving awards. He got covered by public radio international.

It also didn’t take much for Google Lit Trips to grow. Burg has always sought to offer them for free and to allow anyone to contribute. (“That was my plan, take them if you want them.”)

While he does vet each trip, his site has gone on to host lit trips designed by teachers and students at K-12+ levels.

“Once I got two emails in one week. One was from a college professor who said, ‘Did you ever think about doing one on Dante’s Inferno?’ Well, Google’s done a lot of mapping, but they have not mapped Hell yet. The other one was from an elementary school teacher who wondered if I’d ever done The Hobbit.”

To take a lit trip yourself, you need only visit the Google Lit Trips site and navigate to ‘Request a Lit Trip.’ Type your email, and you can request any of the offerings.

“Knowledge is a good thing,” Burg said, “but knowledge plus wisdom makes a big difference.”

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