Weekly Reflection 1

This week we learned about the nuances regarding copyright and the BC FIPPA cloud guidelines. This is applicable to our roles as teachers as these rules will regulate how we can act within the classroom and which technologies we are able to use with students.

The section of the guidelines that was most surprising to learn was the rules regarding the use of United States servers. The guidelines don’t allow information pertaining to adolescents (students) to be transferred to United States servers without consent. This rule has been applied as there is in certain situations very delicate information surrounding students that a teacher is ignorant too, therefore the release of their information to international servers could have consequences. However simple this concept may seem it’s actually quite significant as more often than we are aware our internet usage and information passes through United States servers. For example any use of google accounts involves United States servers, therefore teachers wanting to use google classrooms or gmail are actually breaching these guidelines. This shocking realization intrigued me and some other students, to the point of actually raising the question to real teachers during our Wednesday link to learn school observation session. Some teachers were honestly unaware of the rule breaking taking place but others explained that there was someway they work around the rules allowing the use of google servers. I can’t fully remember what the work around was but was very relieved to hear there was one, as google is an extremely useful tool that I hope to employ in the classroom myself.

In summary the insight we gained into FIBBA’s guidelines were honestly astonishing as we breach them so often in the education system without knowing. Also the way that copyrighting takes place and how easy it is to breach these rules is concerning, we could most-likely all be pursued for an example of copyright breaching in the past however, since none have us have made an effort for monetary gain from copyright breaching there is no desire for perusing. What I took from the lesson as most important is that as long as a breach in to way demands money there is practically no chance you will ever be pursued for copyright aberrations.

Guillaume did not just leave us all scared to break a rule without any awareness, he did leave us with a number of copyright free resources that we can include in projects. One of these resources was openverse, which I actually ended up using to design my class website, as the images on the site were open for copyright free usage.