Privacy settings for student blogging

When working with students on a digital platform, it is necessary to be very aware of privacy and compliance with school acceptable use policies, media releases, and COPPA. 

As a tech coach, I am constantly on the look out for ways to redefine teaching by integrating technology. I poke my nose into the layers of privacy policies, security, and COPPA on a daily basis. To my dismay, I realize that there are often too many cracks in website security for me to even be able to recommend an awesome site to teachers. Digital security is a huge issue, take a look at the blog post on Silicone Angle explaining how Yahoo on is finally focusing on security.

So, I am happy to be able to give a step-by-step breakdown of how to maximize the customizable features of Blogger's privacy settings so that both students and parents feel secure when their students are blogging for an authentic audience. Side now, curious about how to set up Blogger as a teacher, or for you students, or even how to use it? Check out our professional development website page about Blogging in the classroom and stay tuned for more posts about how to capitalize on a blogging platform and get students writing.

Tutorial below on how to set up a very private blog for your students.

1. Settings (all privacy information lives here)

2. Settings, Basic, Privacy, Edit. Here are the basic level Privacy Settings

2a)Change both settings to No

3. Settings, Basic, Permissions

3a) Choose your reader level preference:

***Public: anyone can read if they have the link

***Private: only those who are authors can read (not recommended)

***Private: only those who you add as readers can read (recommended). For example, if each student has a blog, each child can add his or her classmates, teacher, and his or her parents to his or her reader list. This way, parents can only view their own child’s blog.

4. Settings, Click Posts and Comments. See here for more information on moderating comments.

5. Post specific settings:

When you create a post you have other privacy options as well. Click New Post to start writing a post and then options on the right hand side, sidebar.

The iPhone affect, how can we create captivating professional development?

The "iPhone" affect. 

As a district technology coach, my job is to show teachers amazing ways to use technology that allows them to be more efficient and to redefine how they teach.

I want to start viewing my job more like a business rather than like a school. I offer classes to teachers twice a week on a variety of educational topics, but do not have many teachers attending. Why?

I need to market this professional development more effectively so that teachers want to come. My job is to "sell" professional development to teachers, who might not even realize they need it. My job is to market the classes to teachers so they want to give their time after school. My job is to focus on my users' needs, not only on what I want the product to look like.

Our passion for our "product" or rather "professional development" should be evident to all and should spread to others in captivating ways, causing them to pause, rethink what they do, and realize they want something they didn’t realize they wanted before, but are now willing to "pay" anything for it. Teachers' payment is their time.

The iPhone affect, you didn't know you couldn't live without one until you realized how much is changed your life.

Professional development needs to be like that. It shouldn't be a chore to learn, but rather it should totally alter the way in which we teach and how we support our students in their learning.

We want teachers to readily and eagerly giving their time to us in order to learn.

How do you offer captivating professional development in your school? 

Organizing Student Google Docs

Lets Get Organized

Does your inbox flood with "Shared with you" emails from students? Do you constantly have to scour through lists of Google Docs to try to find the one to grade?

Keeping student work organized is essential to making you more efficient as a teacher. Read on for a step by step guide on how to walk your students through organizing their information.

Check out the Naming Convention Document I created to walk teachers through this process as well.

Step 1: Login to Google Account

Step 2: Open Google Drive

Step 3: Click on My Drive

Step 4: Click on Create

Step 5: Click Folder

Step 6: Name your folder Work 2013-2014

Step 7: Click on the folder in the drop down menu on the left

Step 8: Within that folder create a new folder

Step 9: Name your folder P# Last Name, First Name ENG

Step 10: Hover over the folder in the drop down menu on the left

Step 11: Click the arrow, click share.

Step 12: Share with your English teacher

Step 13: Click share and save.

Step 14: Click the arrow next to her name, give her ownership.

Step 15: Move any English Documents into your shared folder named P# Last name, First Name ENG

Step 16: Rename Documents to follow this pattern:

Naming digital assignments (including Google Docs)

(period or number) Assignment Name First Name Last Name

*MS Example: P2 Ancient World Essay Erin Zaich

Step 17:

Email Subject Heading (to make for easy filtering when turning in digital assignments)

HW period number

Example:  HW P2

Emailing Educreations Videos

How To Find the Links to Educreations Videos

Step 1: Login to Educreations on the computer

Step 2: Click on “Welcome, Name!”

Step 3: Click on the title of a video

Step 4: Copy the link that is in the box under the title “Share this”

Step 5: Paste the link in an email and send it to parents.

Friend Request for JFK

What would historical figures post to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? In light of connected educator month, try to infuse your curriculum with a social media flavor.

As Mark Zuckerberg states, "By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent."


Strive to create a transparency within the historical context framework. Having students create social media "accounts" or "profiles" for historical figures allows them to work on the following skills:

• Compare and contrast sharing of information from a historical and a current perspective
• Analyze what information is necessary to share with a public audience
• Discuss privacy from a historical and current perspective
• Analyze whether or not the transparency of the internet is beneficial
• Write about how the historical figure's life would differ if he or she were to post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter
• Compare the use of radio to the use of social media in politics
• Create analogies of current social media tools to their historic counterparts (think blogs to newspapers)

Imagine the possibilities of leveraging the trend in social media to engage students with the ways in which we share personal information. A million conversations around privacy could surface really allowing you to teach students digital citizenship skills.

Check out a few templates below (thank you remixing culture of the present and the future):

• PPT template or the Google Presentation version, kids can save as their own to modify and the rubric here (from someone awesome!)

• Word document of a blank Facebook profile template

• Instagram template PDF and Jpegs. Print and draw photos or simply add your own photo over the top. 

• Blank Twitter PDF template from history tech

EdTech you need to focus on security

Dear Edtech Startup,

As a technology coach for an elementary and middle school district, I am saddened when I analyze your login pages for security and encryption and then realize that there is none. When someone signs up for your site, especially if they are going to be using it with children, it is important that they feel safe and secure. 

I look for the https as well as the lock symbol and have begun to put together a tutorial for teachers on how to do this themselves. If the security isn’t there when I am inputting my personal information (email, password, name etc) then I stop. Why would I continue if someone could hack in or find my personal information? Yes maybe it is hypothetical and a long shot, but still if it is possible I don’t want to risk that.

Additionally, why do your privacy policies need to be so complicated? Why do they need to be written in a very confusing way that causes me to stop and realize that I can’t tell if the site is suitable for children under 13 to login to or not? Please make it more obvious if kids under 13 can use your site. As an edtech company this will only help you in the long run. Right now I spend many hours punching in “command F” to find whether or not there is a statement concerning children under 13. Help me, help you, by making this easier. I want teachers in my district to be able to use your site, but right now due to privacy policies and lack of SSL I can’t. Comply with COPPA, and make it so we can understand that you are.

It would be better for all of us if you could do the following:

1) Add SSL, seriously, it isn’t that hard. Spend the money, set it up. You will start to find that more and more schools are becoming aware of the need to be more secure with what information they allow students to post. If you want schools using your site, add SSL.

2) Simplify your privacy policy and use fewer words. I understand that there is legal speak needed, but seriously it would be better if you used fewer words.

3) Have an option for a teacher to use the site without students having to create accounts

Why you should do it:

1) The purpose of your site is for kids, if kids can’t use it, why did you make it?

2) Security is important in the digital era, don’t you want your users to feel protected and safe when they login to your site?

3) Teachers don’t have time to scour your site for the privacy policy, make it easier, make it known if kids under 13 can’t/shouldn’t use it.

I very much appreciate your consideration of this letter.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear on Educreations

Lights, Camera, Record! I work with teachers to create and to redefine lessons leveraging technology. We strive to capitalize upon the hardware investment in our district and enable teachers to utilize technology to its full capacity.

Imagining the impossible and making it possible is my daily goal. I educate the teachers I work with on the SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition) philosophy of integrating technology that emphasizes rather than using technology as a digital worksheet, we want to use technology as a way to create creative content.

Primary teachers often struggle with how to leverage technology in meaningful ways that do not take a million hours. That being said, recently I worked with several kindergarten teachers in my district to use Educreations to practice sequencing. Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a quintessential sequencing book in kinder. Usually, teachers have students cut out images, order them on a sentence strip, and glue them in order. Well, gone are the days of glue and sticky fingers and paper scraps. Leveraging the ground breaking FREE app, Educreations, we used Matt Gomez’s blog post to retell the story in order to practice and to assess student sequencing.

I assisted the teachers by doing the following prep steps in order to be able to get the images into Educreations:

1) Download his PDF of the Brown Bear images

2) Take screen shots of each animal (shift, command, 4)

3) Upload the images to a shared Google Drive or Drop Box folder or share via airdrop if using IOS 7 (here is the shared google drive folder)

4) Open Drive or Drop Box on the iPad and download the images to the photos app

5) Open Educreations

6) Click the image button, click photos, click camera roll, and add the photos to the Educreations video

We practiced creating a video together, saving it as private, and then emailing it to someone from the Educreations website rather than the app as our shared iPads aren’t set up with emailing capacity.

Excitement and nervousness flooded the teacher’s faces as we finished our short videos. I reassured them that I would be happy to run the iPad Brown Bear station in their class when the time came to create the videos.

The following week, my iPad in tow, I arrived at one of the schools eager to help the darling kinders with their activity. Prepared for class, as all kinder teachers are, the teacher had already logged into her Educreations account on all of the iPads so that the students would be able to save the video (note that the Educreations privacy policy states that children under 13 must have parental permission to create thier own accounts). Additionally, she had saved the Brown Bear images onto the Photo app on each iPad. Students in 4th grade were there to help, which was wonderful, so my role became more of an observer and trouble shooter. The following are the directions that the 4th grade students were given:

1) Open Educreations

2) Insert the Brown Bear images into the video

3) Leave the images out of order

4) Ask your kinder buddy to practice retelling the Brown Bear story

5) Explain to your kind that they will retell the story and move the icons into order

6) Remind them to speak up and say Bye at the end

7) Press record (note that if they make a mistake, just pause, and have them verbally correct themselves)

8) Press pause when the finish

9) Click done

10) Name the video Brown Bear (Student First name)

11) Save it as private

While I completed this activity weeks ago, this is still one of my most favorite lessons of the year. To me the thrill of a parent receiving an email with a video of their child retelling a story is incredible. With technology, we are now able to preserve not only the handwriting of children, but their voice, their laugh, and their learning. Challenge yourself to leverage technology to create digital artifacts that speak to and inspire you.