EDLD+5365+Discussion+Board+Posts

Based on your readings and the lecture, what do you see as the most pressing legal and ethical issues for Websites in K-12 schools today? According to "Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools", one of the pressing legal issues is protecting our younger children from inappropriate materials. "The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) limits the ability of Websites to offer services to children ages 12 and younger without explicit parental consent." It's goal is to protect children's privacy and safety online. Solomon and Schrum also state that one of the most common unethical uses of the internet involves the use of copyright. "Many people seem to believe that because they are physically able to copy or download files, it is OK to go ahead and do it." People need to learn that just because they are physically able to do something doesn't mean they should do it.
 * Week 1**

"Does your school currently work with a Web hosting partner?" Jarrell ISD works with two people. Our main site is hosted by Region 13 Education Service Center and the teacher pages are hosted by NetStart. The reason for two is because of security issues with Esc13, teachers can't have access to the entire website, so our Technology Director looked for a web-based solution for the teachers.
 * Week 2**

"Discuss the benefits of the Drupal Content Management System." Drupal allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer. The built-in-functionality, combined with dozens of free available add-on modules, will enable features such as content management systems, blogs, collaborative authoring environments, forums, peer-to-peer networking, newsletters, podcasting, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, and much more. Drupal is widely popular because it provides a powerful, scalable, low cost, high value solution to manage and grow an internet presence. It is open source, which means the code is freely available to anyone to use and modify. This means no license fees and no vendor lock in.
 * Week 3**

Do you currently use podcasting? We do not currently use podcasting in our school. I think we should, and that it would be a great thing if teachers did podcasts of their daily lessons and/or instructions and uploaded them on their teacher web pages for students and parents to access. The problem is, most of our teachers don't even keep their basic web pages up to date. Once they understand how beneficial things like this could be for our students, and that it isn't hard to do, maybe they will start doing it.
 * Week 4**

Is there a functioning Web Oversight Committee at your school? How would you go about establishing one? No, my school does not have a web oversight committee. To my knowledge, we have never had one. I would start out by asking for volunteers for the committee. I think that the committee would be more successful if the members of the committee were actively involved, and had knowledge of Web mastering.
 * Week 5**