GAFE and Privacy

Google Apps For Education (GAFE). This for many of us, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been invaluable, essential, a "god send." It's provided a standardized, simple to use, broadly accessible platform for hosting educational content for students, meeting places through google hangouts, and even provides the tools to generate the content with their google office suite. The role of chromebooks in our modern classroom have been equally important as it provides an affordable for students or school districts to get students online.

The role of technology in the modern classroom is huge. Below is a TEDx talk from a high school student's perspective can be seen here where she discusses her own personal experience and also her experience going into elementary classrooms and seeing how these tools are used in a classroom setting.

There are however concerns when it comes to considering privacy and security. One of the biggest was discussed in our EDUC5131 class around hosting of data. From a Canadian perspective, any personal data of students must be hosted within Canada due to FOIPOP (Freedom of Information, Protection of Privacy) concerns and the access it provides external entities based on laws in host countries. Google does not guarantee Canadian hosting and thus a lot of content can't be posted or saved via GAFE. Similar concerns have been studied in other contexts like in Sweden (Lindh & Nolin, 2016) and there are certainly still concerns even six years after this study was published about Google surveillance and security of our students' data.

Another concerns surround GAFE relates to the educational component. Properly educating students on privacy and security since a lot of their content is now being hosted online where theoretically they can access or share anything. There is a useful article depicting the considerations of elementary educators on privacy and security (Kumar et al., 2019). They note in their paper that there is not a lot of direct instruction when it comes to security and privacy online, even with in the platforms they use in a school setting. The article also outlines four general contexts in their discussion section where teachers can integrate privacy and security into their lessons.

While most of us rely heavily on GAFE in 2022 and are often directed to use it now as a standard teaching practice, some of these issues and the research surrounding them are important to consider so we are not naive to the pitfalls of engaging across Canada (and really the world) with this platform.

Kumar, P. C., Chetty, M., Clegg, T. L., & Vitak, J. (2019). Privacy and security considerations for digital technology use in elementary schools. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13.

Lindh M., & Nolin J. (2016). Information We Collect: Surveillance and Privacy in the Implementation of Google Apps for Education. European Educational Research Journal. 15(6), 644-663. doi:10.1177/1474904116654917