If you’re an educator currently employed by an institution in Europe, chances are you have now received a fair amount of information about how the new General Data Protection Regulation (a.k.a. the GDPR) affects you and your students.
You may know, for example, that processing student data the way we used to is no longer accepted and that violation of any of the new guidelines can lead to massive fines.
While most teachers in the region are likely to produce puzzled looks when asked about the GDPR, I bet my fellow Educational Technology Specialists, alongside their local Data Protection Officers, could easily come up with at least a dozen different reasons why the new regulation has been (pretty much) driving everyone crazy for the last 18 months.
In my case, some of the most hair-pulling challenges include rethinking how digital portfolios and learning artifacts are shared with the outside world, the creation and storage of login information for our younger students, reexamining logistical pieces about the data that is shared with current and prospective parents, rewriting device-sharing procedures when uploading data to the cloud, and so on.
In the long run, there is no doubt that everyone will benefit from these changes, necessary as they are, but right now it might be safe to say that head-scratching questions and concerns are still aplenty.
Recently, as my work partner (the intrepid @louisephinney) and I were getting ready to present, yet again, at an all-faculty event about what educators can and can’t do in our quest to become compliant, it dawned on me that our students, avid users of the internet like the other four billion of us, have the same right to be informed. I mean, if it’s difficult for us to understand why we are receiving a thousand emails a day about updated privacy notices, data-processing this, and data-downloading that, imagine what it’s like for them!
Then, I did what I thought was expected in trying to find resources online that could help me create a short, informative lesson for them. To my surprise, however, apart from a set of primary school lessons from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office there was nothing else that I would consider accessible to 8, 9 and 10 year-olds. Besides, because I’m slightly obsessed about presentation design and just couldn’t live with a bunch of 1990s Cliparts, I created the presentation below, with the addition of a few short video resources I found.
This past week alone, I taught this lesson exactly 12 times, to all of our grade 3, 4 and 5 students. After each of the initial four sessions, I was able to adapt and tweak the slides, based on either the questions students posed, or the looks and stares I received. So, by now, having fully attested to its efficiency, my hope is that you and your school can also make use of this resource. Feel free to make a copy and adapt it to your liking! The note section of each slide contains a blurb that can guide you while unveiling the information for the children.
Please share any other engaging activities, extensions, or adaptations to this lesson you may have come up with, so I can learn from you as well.
We value your privacy, they say. (image source: Pixabay)