FIPPA (Freedom of Information & Protection of Privacy Act)
We are working within the BC context of FIPPA. FIPPA governs privacy in the public sector and provides guidelines we must all follow to ensure people's safety is protected while online. As teachers, we have legal obligations to the children we teach to make sure they are safe online. These legal obligations vary depending on whether the information collected is stored within or out of Canada.
If a student’s data is collected and stored within Canada parental consent is not needed. For example, if they are using an app that doesn’t store to the web or have any personal data collection you do not need consent as the information will remain only on the iPad. This is very important when taking pictures as you never want to store students’ pictures to the cloud.
If data is being stored or accessed outside of Canada then you need parental consent. Therefore, you need to know where different sites store information that you upload. For example, Scholantis in our district #72 is stored in Victoria, BC. whereas, Google is stored in the USA.
It is imperative that you understand the rules regarding FIPPA as you could be legally held accountable if they are not followed appropriately.
In Campbell River, we not only follow the FIPPA rules but ask for parent consent whenever students are using technology and/or accessing the web because we are working with children under the age of 19. Please see the different forms we use in Campbell River.
You may find your school district doesn't have a permission form for a certain use of technology. We have found that to be the case in our district so in order to keep ourselves safe we have created our own forms to use. For instance, during our post-graduate diploma work we wanted to be able to use photos (without student's faces) in some of our assignments so we created a permission form for parents to sign to allow us to use photos of their child. Here are a few examples to take a look at and to help you create your own.
We would love to hear from you! Please let us know how we can grow our site and what content you might like to see us add. We would also love to see what you have used and how you have implemented blended learning in your own practice.
If you have something you would like to add to this page, please send an email to [email protected].