LightintheWoods

Do they know how marketers watch?

In an effort to make website privacy policies kid friendly, The Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Blog shared this neat story out of Ontario. Val Steeves (University of Ottawa) and Jacquelyn Burkell and Anca Micheti (University of Western Ontario) researched students abilities/willingness to read & comprehend online text. Now the they have come together to draft child friendly privacy policy consents for websites.

Their guidelines provide advice on word choice and phrasing (avoid double negatives; keep sentences simple and paragraphs short); information structure (arrange information in a logical order; start paragraphs with topic sentences); and design consideration (use 12-14 font size and typefaces designed for the web or preferred by kids; leave enough white space).

Turns out that a simpler version of privacy policy is coming to websites near you. I hope they continue collaborating with students and youth nation wide on this issue. I wonder how Canadian classrooms could get together to create this policy together? It will be interesting to see what comes of this initiative. I think this is another movement for the childs voice. Might make it easier for adults too
More from Val Steeves

How children’s sites see your kids as marketing goldmines

My apologies to Lee Lefever and CommonCraft for the play on words.

I posted this in the discussion forum of the Digital Internship Project

I was naive in thinking that all Grade 6’s would have email. Turns out only about 60% do. The division I am in has it in their policy that students in grade 4 and over should have email addresses but this is slow in it’s implementation. As a result, I have been contemplating how to get them all addresses and decided to send them all home with the assignment of emailing me if they could. Perhaps I should of created them all gmail accounts? I think that I will create accounts for different applications in the future.

(One mistake in the situation above is that I gave them my teacher gmail account rather than my division email. I am going to ensure that all further correspondence takes place through my school account.)

But I digress, a couple days later a mother has written a note in an agenda stating that “her daughter is too young to have email.” uhoh, road bump. I have this floating in my head all day trying to think about solutions, when another student asks if it’s ok to use his Dad’s email account. a-ha solution.

This is just a minor situation and I have only had brief contact with a couple parents. But tonight I am going to compose a note to go home introducing the blog. And hopefully once my students start blogging we’ll have the parents in for a show and tell. I will talk briefly about blogging and rationale, but I also want to ensure parents of their child’s safety.

I am looking for suggestions and stories of experience from each of you reading this. What would put in a letter to go home? What would show or say to parents? Of course everyone’s situation is a bit different, but this is a major issue to be addressed.