Admin Minute 9/25
Ok, it takes more than 60 seconds...
COPPA
This Admin Minute is focused on COPPA or Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. COPPA is a law that was actually established for commercial companies but its stretch actually affects schools quite a bit. For many years, companies turned a blind eye to who signed up for their product and in turn many children (defined in the law as under 13) signed up. After several lawsuits around the country, we are now seeing COPPA being more strictly enforced and much more from companies in terms of warnings when signing up for accounts. These warning have led our teachers to shy away from creating student accounts. The reality is that the school/teachers have the ability to be the permission giver instead of the guardian in this situation if the account they are asking students to sign up for has an educational purpose. Parents actually click an acknowledgement in INFOSNAP that allows us to sign up students for such accounts. The tricky part of student account creation is in the privacy policy language of the commercial company. Some companies will not allow anyone under the age of the 13 to sign up (with or without permission) because they know that the information collected will be given to a 3rd party vendor(aka- they are unlawfully giving a child's identifiable information away). To keep compliant on behalf of the school we have put together a couple of documents that you can see below. One is a basic guide that walks teachers through the steps to think about as they create student accounts for educational purposes. The other is a working list of sites we know we use and if they are OK for anyone, OK for students over 13, or NOT OK for anyone under the age of 18. This is simply a heads up for you. We will finish vetting this approach shortly and Dan, Carly and Kyle would like to steal a few minutes at an upcoming staff meeting to walk teachers through this process and answer any questions they may have. We want to empower our students with these amazing tools but want to protect our students and staff in the process.