Protecting privacy when sharing student data with the community

*revision 2014* The MOE have contacted me and have since said that it is not ok to publish the NSN number online, even if it is not associated with a name and only shared with parents. To get around this you could use the school student ID number?

After a few conversations at school about the ethics behind sharing student results with parents and other class members +Hamish Arthur came up with an idea that we could hide the student name and use the National Student Number, then unhide the name when we wanted to add data - after about 5 seconds of fiddling with a table in google docs it was clear that this was the way to do it - students and parents can find the boy with the NSN, and the teacher can toggle the hide column - so we wouldn't waste time and easily mismark work when using 9 digit long references instead of names! This is how you do it..

1) Make sure all the students know their NSN number - they should know this if they are level 2, but some level 1 students might need to be told what it is. Easy to find on Kamar or your school admin system - they need to know it anyway and should be encouraged to use it.

2) Export from Kamar a spreadsheet containing the NSN numbers (see this how to guide - and modify at step 3 to insert NSN number from NZQA info)

3) Open your student data table and insert a row to the left of the names, copy and paste the NSN numbers (first checking your student data table has the same name order as the new NSN data)

4) Hide the column with the student names by moving the mouse to the top of column 'b' (or the column where the names were stored) and clicking on the small triangle pointing down - you should have the option to hide the column!

5) This is the table that the parents and students will see when they check the homework, when you want to edit the table you can unhide the name by clicking in the area that looks like the picture below and expanding it.

Make sure you have shared the table as 'view only' or anyone will be able to unhide the column!!

# I tried to use 3 different classes data so that I didn't violate privacy issues in this post about violating privacy!! #

Comments

How to collaborate with ChatGPT in the research process and actually learn something

If you have used chatGPT before, it can sometimes feel like talking with someone who has done too much of their 'research on Facebook', filling in gaps with random facts marginally related to the topic just so they can respond and keep the conversation going. However, if applied or 'prompted' correctly, with the user utterly aware of the limitations and ethical considerations, chatGPT can be a helpful research assistant. There is already a wide range of tools available that are built on chatGPT that can support many of the things described below; however, I am still a bit hesitant to rush in with most of them being 'freemium' or asking you to upload your own research and other details or data into their database, I'm happy to stick with the open version of chatGPT as it is what our students have access to. Image created with AI The following guide highlights some prompts, some follow-up questions and most importantly, what you need to do next to follow up a...

Group email parents with Kamar and Gmail

After # EdChatNZ on Thursday night I was really determined to make digital contact with parents and share with them the great work their sons were doing! At our school we use Kamar to collect absences, store student data and report back to parents. It has a handy function where you can click on a student and email the parents directly, but I wanted to email all the parents of classes at once. After a bit of playing around I managed to find a way to do it, here's what I did!!! 1) In Kamar select 'Printing' then select 'Export' This will save the file so you can copy the addresses into gmail, rather than printing it out. 2) Now you need to select your class - as I wanted to email one class at a time I need to select a single class, but you have to option to select multiple groups. Click on 'Option Subject' and then type your teacher code into the box. Your classes should all appear and then when you select the class it will copy into the b...

Motivation and homework follow up...

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '. The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score. I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!

Future Learning Blog

Search This Blog