A large push in education recently is giving our students a platform to have a voice and share their creations with the community, and to make connections with the world. Many platforms have made it extremely convenient for our teachers and students to access programs with an individual login issued by school districts. While these resources may allow our students to collaborate, share, and reflect; do we really know what happens once our students login? As part of an ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) certified educator cohort, I’ve taken the opportunity to investigate some of our most widely used resources a bit closer.

My first investigation was focused on taking a closer look at the video resource, Flipgrid. According to Flipgrid’s “Terms of Use”, Flipgrid makes student privacy a priority. Flipgrid states that they won’t sell information, even to a third party, but they may use the data to make improvements to their resource or to communicate with Grid Owners (Adults 18 and over) about Grid features. When creating an account on Flipgrid, Flipgrid will collect name, email, password and school information. Information (video, text, student feedback, etc) that is posted to Flipgrid, will also be stored in the service. While collecting who accesses the website/app, the company will even track down to the device that is being used and the IP address location. Flipgrid does advise parent consent forms and to check with district policies prior to use as they abide by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act for anyone under the age of 13. One thing that I found incredibly interesting about the site, is that parents can exercise their right to contact Flipgrid and have their student’s data removed.

After learning more about the terms and privacy of Flipgrid, I decided to take a closer look at a resource that our district has purchased for all buildings to use. Many have fallen in love with it, so I was curious to read the privacy and terms for the very popular resource known as Seesaw. Immediately upon opening the Seesaw Privacy Policy, the very first sentence states..

“Seesaw’s mission is to create an environment where students can be their best.  To accomplish this goal, it’s essential that Seesaw is a safe place for students to document their learning, and that parents and teachers are in complete control over how that information is shared.”

https://web.seesaw.me/privacy-policy

While Seesaw does emphasize on it being a safe place for students to share, like many other resources, they do collect information from any individual connected to Seesaw; this includes family. What surprised me about the privacy policy for Seesaw, is that it can take up to 7 years for Seesaw to delete abandoned accounts. One can contact Seesaw directly to have their account deleted, but they will still retain information for up to 60 days.

For my final digital resource, I decided to take a closer look at our district science curriculum resource, TCI. This was a new content area resource that our district adopted about two years ago, where one of their main online features is an interactive notebook. Very similar to Flipgrid and Seesaw, TCI will save any postings that are made by users to their website. What surprised me the most about this resource, compared to others, is that it actually deletes student accounts and information on June 30th of each year. Where as the other resources above may even archive them for years.

Based on the information that was found in the privacy policies of the information above, I don’t think there would be any changes that I would necessarily make to the resources we are using. What I think we may need to do as a district is to make users more aware of what happens to the information that is posted online, since many tend to click directly through the privacy policy notices. More importantly, allowing parents and students to know their right to contact the companies so they know they have the option to have their student information deleted.