Seattle Schools Community Forum

From Marketplace: Meet the most measured, monitored and data-mined students in the history of education.  Your children . How about this district in California , tracking every kid who uses social media.  From Tech Dirt : The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity . After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy. As the article states, the district was starting to use this service at the end of the year but waited until the start of THIS year to tell parents. Nice. The company's About Us page is, as the article says, pretty o...

My big focus for the foreseeable future is student data privacy .   Data collection is the future of our nation and nowhere else is that more clear than public education. My goal is a student data privacy bill passed in the Washington State Legislature.  In a future thread, I will outline what SPS is doing versus what it should be doing but really, I don't have time to wait for the Board to wake up (and district leadership is a lost cause).  We need a robust law to protect our public school children. Data is a good thing - like standards and assessments.  But it's all in the collection and implementation and uses and that's the devil in the details that needs attention. You cannot stop an idea.  And the idea today is that vast amounts of data are going to better our lives and, allegedly, the lives of our children and grandchildren.  But we can use the force of law and especially our Constitution, to protect that data from going everywhere to ne...