FIPPA, Privacy, and Consent Resources

It is second nature to most to take selfies, share them on Instagram, Snapchat, etc., but once you move into the role of a public body employee (e.g., in health, education, etc.), you must adhere to the laws set out by the B.C. Office of Information and Privacy Commissioner. Their office has put together guidelines for both public bodies and private bodies. The guidelines for public bodies to better understand what the rules are is linked below and how to get consent is detailed on page 4:

BC Cloud Computing Guidelines (PDF)

and you can review the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act here.

Each public body will have their own process (which may range from not allowing  tools to pressure to integrate networked learning tools from outside of Canada), so it is important to understand your own setting and the law. You may find some administrators or staff breaking these rules or not aware of them. It is important for you to enter your field and uphold the law, regardless of the culture you enter. This does not mean that you do not engage online or outside of Canada. It means that if/when you do so, that you understand the steps, which are not much more complex than the consent you would get normally for going “on the Internet,” as is described in most settings, but you must name the date consent is effective and, if applicable, the date it expires. It is important that you work with your school district on the consent process. You can see an example of how school district are addressing access to cloud tools outside of Canada here (Coquitlam) and here plus here (Victoria). You must also name each tool individually. It cannot be “blogging.” You must name WordPress.com or Blogger, etc. If you use Flipgrid, you must name Flipgrid. Consent must also be informed, so effort must be taken to ensure that those signing consent understand the implications – that their data may leave Canada, how it may be harvested, and to know about the U.S. Patriot Act. One archived resource by the Canadian Treasury Board provides significant detailed information about the Patriot Act here. It is helpful to also review section 4(b) of the B.C. Digital Literacy Framework which is applicable K12 contexts but helpful for others.

Additional resources can be found here:

Privacy Education for Kids by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Information Security Awareness by the BC Government

MediaSmarts: Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy

FIPPA, Privacy, and Consent Competencies

Learners should ensure that they:

• Are aware of the OIPC, FIPPA, and the Cloud Computing Guidelines and follow them
• Understand what constitutes personal information
• Understand that privacy online is a personal choice and must be respected
• Understand if that you assume a “public body” hat, you have a duty for those under your care, their parents and families, and your colleagues with regard to their privacy and protection of personal information
• Are aware that the Canadian federal government states that the chances are remote that the US Patriot Act will access personal information of Canadians, but recognizes that it is our responsibility to protect privacy preferences and to ensure that consent obtained is informed consent. Some families may be involved with restraining orders and need to be private for their safety, but the reasons for privacy may be preference. Either way, it is not our business as to the reasons for privacy preferences, but it is our responsibility to uphold preferences.
• Understand how media moves through networks into US cloud-based services (e.g., back-ups on iTunes, syncing with Dropbox, messages with personal information is sent on Gmail, blog RSS subscriptions, etc.)
• Understand that these acts do not prohibit participation in networked tools outside of Canada and many public bodies are in need of staff and leaders who model networked literacy and positive citizenship online for their community
• Understand what appropriate consent looks like for public bodies and is aware of what alternative steps are to support learners when consent is not obtained.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

As we are encouraging learner-owned data and personal preferences for collaboration spaces, we will need to collect information from you about if and where you are setting up your accounts. We have created an online survey, if you wish to post your data publicly (if applicable, your blog URL, your Twitter account, and your inquiry topics/areas of interest) and those not wishing to have their info posted publicly can opt to share any or all questions directly to their instructor via email.

Note, you can still have a public blog, but set posts to private or password-protected, but the URL could be publicly posted/aggregated on our website. Again, cloud-based tools hosted outside of Canada are optional for this class, as is anything that might compromise one’s privacy preference.

You have TWO options for sharing your information:

1. Via the survey we created (make sure you read all of the information provided). This option will have your Blog and Twitter links and topics of interest posted publicly for sharing (all except your email address and Trello, which we will be setting up for you if you consent).
2. Send an email to your instructor with the responses to each of the questions posted on the form. With this option, we will only share publicly any accounts or information you designate.

We are here to help you create your site, so do not hesitate to ask for technical support. To get started on creating your site we suggest the following steps:

The first Steps:

1. Log in if you have not already logged in; get familiar with the administration interface and click here for more information on it. The administration interface is also, where the Dashboard in WordPress is located and you can get more info about it here.
2. Remember: When you are in the site administration area of your site, you can get tips on what you are doing by clicking the “Help” menu on the top-right corner.
3. Review your settings, start by changing your Site Title under Settings>General. You need to hit the “Save” button to save your changes. (More information about General Settings here.)
4. Add a new post. You can pick one of the existing categories by checking a box on the sidebar of the authoring interface. You can manage your categories here. You will need to hit the blue “Publish” button on the right hand side before your post appears. Information on managing the privacy settings on individual posts is here.
5. We have created your ePortfolio with some sample pages. You can add more pages, or you can delete what is there. Maybe start by changing your about me page by introducing yourself and sharing a little about yourself.
6. You are welcome to change the images and upload your own. Here is information about using images from Google.

WordPress Tutorials

When you’re ready to start customizing your blog and putting content in, check out some tutorials available to you:

Beginner’s guide for WordPress by WPBeginner

Learn WordPress website by WordPress

Digital Tattoo Project at UBC – learn digital literacy skills. Check out the menu sections and consider looking at the publish section.

WordPress Tutorials by UVic’s OAC

• TIP: You can access a better “dashboard” (an admin panel) by adding “/wp-admin” to the end of your WordPress URL. For example, if your blog address is: http://myname.wordpress.com then type in http://myname.opened.ca/wp-admin to access the improved black dashboard.

The video below, created by a UVic student, shows how to use blog post categories to make a menu.

wordpress categories tutorial

buckle your seatbelts, jane and i are about to teach you how to create categories for your wordpress blog and add them to your blog’s main menu, so that ever…

If you are confused about anything it is always good to do an initial Google or YouTube search, or reach out to your learning pod or your instructor.

Photo by Webaroo on Unsplash

To assist you in finding good images that are not copyrighted, please review the following resources:

Creative Commons is an initiative that provides licensing options that span between copyrighted and public domain. You can learn more about Creative Commons on their website here. You may also search for Creative Commons licensed images here:

https://search.creativecommons.org/

Creative commons licensed images are free to share (see each license for different permissions, such as non-commercial or commercial use, free to modify or not, etc.), but they require attribution. To learn more about how to attribute a creative commons licensed image, please visit the following resource:

Best practices for attribution

Another source for images is UnSplash, where photos are licensed for the public domain and attribution is not required:

https://unsplash.com/

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

We have made things easy for you in terms of finding each other’s public blogs by way of the EDCI Blog Hub, but that won’t be there forever. Individuals can use “RSS Readers” to subscribe to “feeds” from websites. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or often Really Simple Syndication. It sounds too techy, but just think of it as helping you to “follow” blogs in a “reader” program, much like how Instagram is a “reader” you use to follow accounts.

One reader we recommend is Feedly. Note that it is US-based, so if you choose to create an account there, be aware of that as it relates to your privacy. Read up on our Privacy Resource page if you have not already done so. You can subscribe to news blogs, political blogs, blogs of other educators, blogs of your learners, etc.

You also have the option of subscribing to blogs within WordPress.

If you have a favourite reader you would like to see mentioned here, please email edci335 at uvic dot ca.

If you are interested in exploring more advanced, though not that hard, RSS aggregation and want to learn more about how we set up the EDCI 335 Blog Hub, feel free to chat with your instructor. In short, we used a WordPress Plug-in called “Feedzy,” which copies content from blog RSS feeds and imports that into the blog it’s installed on. If you are using a site on opened.ca, there is a plugin available to you called “FeedWordPress” that you can use to do the same thing as Feedzy, but with more options.

How to find an RSS feed for a site.

WordPress automatically generates a feed for sites and comments and you can find the feed by simply adding ‘/feed’ to a wordpress url. For example, the feed for this site is https://edtechuvic.ca/edci335/feed. Further, you can subscribe to a specific category on a site. This is what we do to aggregate your posts for EDCI 335, and is why you must use that category every time you post. To find the feed for a category you add /category/[slug-of-the-category]/feed. So if you want to subscribe to Heidi’s posts in Feedly, you would use https://edtechuvic.ca/hjames/category/edci335/feed. The feed for Colin’s site is a little bit different, but will accomplish the same thing https://teaching.madland.ca/edci335-may-2020/home.rss.

Note that following the links to those feeds will only show you a page of code. You need to use a feed reader to view the actual posts. We have provided instructions for setting up Feedly here. You do not need to pay for a subscription to Feedly, the free version will work for this course.