In the days before technology, keeping personal information safe and secure meant storing your personal documents in a lockbox, keeping up with your wallet, credit cards, and driver’s license, and not giving out your home address to people you didn’t know. With information sharing, transactions, and communications moving online, the methods of keeping your information safe and secure have become more elusive. Not only is it important to be aware of what information you are choosing to share over the internet, but it is also important to know how that information is being used and how it is or isn’t being stored.
Many understand the terms data security and privacy to be interchangeable, and while they are in the same vein, they are slightly different. Data security refers to how you protect your data from unauthorized access; data privacy is how that data is protected from various levels, how it is collected, who is it shared with, what is it being used for, and more (SPI Briefing Room, 2015).
As educators, the responsibility to keep student information safe and secure is of even higher importance. Elementary students lack the maturity, experience, and abstract thinking to understand how their behavior on the internet could harm them later in life, which is why elementary teachers bear responsibility as their protectors (Hamilton, 2018, p. 50). An understanding of what child protection laws are in place, intentionality in understanding the privacy policies of any online resources, and an effort to ensure students understand the weight of sharing information online can create a safe and secure foundation for technology use within schools.
Hamilton, B. (2018). Integrating Technology in the Classroom: Tools to Meet the Needs of Every Student (2nd ed.). International Society for Technology in Education.
SPI Briefing Room. (2015, July 20). Data Privacy vs. Data Security [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frFVppv2Q8k&feature=youtu.be