Teacher asks YA author if virtual visit can take place "with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us"
From the Free Range Kids blog, a remarkable story from a YA author who was invited to address a fourth grade class:
I was setting up a phone call with a 4th-grade teacher and her class -- they live a good thousand miles across the country from me. I let her know that I have Skype, so nobody needs incur any long-distance charges. Her response via e-mail just now: "Is there a way to Skype with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us? Due to confidentiality and other school district guidelines, I am hoping this is a possibility."Can You Please Come Talk to My Class...But Not Look at Anyone?Truly, I am speechless. I'm just glad this won't be an in-person school visit, because it would be really awkward wearing a blindfold all day, lest I actually lay eyes on these kids.
the latest
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I suppose there is a slight chance you might be overcome with lust at the sight of so many young kids and start masturbating...
Children - they should be heard, but not seen.
It's frightening that they let these Stepford People teach our kids, it really is.
Educated people used to be the voice of reason, didn't they?
What's with the notion that the internet makes everything scarier?
Speaking as someone who just quit a government job because of the constant barrage of these types of moronic requests, color me not the least bit surprised. I always thought the people working in government just liked to mess with people until I got on the inside. I'm sorry to say it's not just a case of "old boy's club" syndrome. Whether it's endemic of (to?) the system or a result of miserable employees I can't say. I didn't want to risk staying long enough to turn into one of them.
The school district might be concerned that the author would be able to tape the call in some manner compromising student privacy, whereas most attempts to do so in person would be more easily detected...
Regardless, still seems kind of paranoid.
Clearly, this school is actually a private nudist school and everybody is naked.
Only reasonable explanation I can think of.
you might be overreacting. its a funny spin on it but maybe there are confidentiality guidelines
I think she may be worried that her students will be able to be 'seen' by anyone/everyone with internet access.
She just needs some reassurance that her kids will not be on 'display' to the world at large.
Naive, but no worse than that.
Yeah, yeah, snarky outrage. You folks have to understand the policy environment in which schools do their work. There are a lot of regs from the feds and states that are there for very good reasons. Unfortunately, this encourages a somewhat defensive, anti-innovation mindset. How do we start solving this problem? Find out if the school has a "visiting speaker" policy. Most do; I doubt any of those policies prevent the visitor from looking at the children. So the teacher (or better yet, district technology coordinator) gets the board or superintendent to extend the policy to "remote visitors". Better still: get remote visiting added to the district's technology plan so it becomes not only permitted but encouraged. See, bureaucracy is your friend! Schools are no worse than most large organizations -- think of what it'd take to get your employer or other behemoth in your life to adopt some obviously beneficial innovation that's not quite in the fairway of its business goals.
Actually, I'm more concerned that this teacher did not understand that the problem is solved as long as there is no connected camera in the classroom -- that's a sure sign of underpreparation for using educational technology.
I think this may just be a legal thing concerning images being broadcast or placed on the net. For example, if you enter a venue where an event is being filmed, you might see a sign that says your image may be used blah blah blah. Kids cannot sign release forms, nor can they enter into contracts without their parents. So to avoid the rigmarole the school just says "no sending of their images". Maybe they don't make a distinction between narrow and broad casts. Or maybe the teacher is just mistaken in her interpretation. I don't think it has anything to do with a fear that the author will see the children, but simply control over the beaming of the children's images. No beaming = no questions of control or privacy or rights. done and done.
What is truly frightening is that she had to ask the question. How hard is it to aim HER camera at the ceiling or cover it with a cloth? Certainly explains a lot about the dismal state of our education system when simple logic problems escape responsible adults.
"Is there a way to Skype with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us?"
Is anyone else disturbed by the inability of this teacher to figure out that she can put something opaque in front of her webcam, or point it at the ceiling?
What I find most fascinating is that the visual is problematic, but the audio is not.
This really isn't surprising. The teacher is following the district policy, which was in fact set because some crazy-ass parent flipped out about having their child's soul stolen by the magical picture-making box.
Truly, not the teachers fault. Blame the parents. They're the ones who set the policies or at a minimum allow the crazies to define the agenda.
Yes guys, don't overthink this one. I have to sign a release form every year from my daughter's school in case there might be filming or pictures being taken for newspapers etc. lots of parents are not keen on having their child's image floating around without their knowledge. The teacher did the right thing, but like stated above, she can just point her webcam at the wall.
@ronan: Or even just run skype with the webcam turned off (or on a computer without a webcam)?
I ran into a similar issue when I visited a middle school this year. I'm a science grad student and the classroom visit was part of my university's science outreach program. The program director suggested that we take some pictures of ourselves teaching the young'uns as this makes for good PR on the program website, but she reminded us not to take any pictures that show the kids' faces.
#7 is correct. On my children's school registration forms, they give parents the option of disallowing your child's image to be used in media. I think it's a nice privacy effort, given that any number of people (tv news, yearbook, researchers from local university, etc) come to the school.
Honestly, I don't get you, Cory. Here's a teacher actually trying to abide by her school's privacy code in a way that doesn't make a student feel uncomfortable (i.e., "Cathy, can you sit in the corner behind the webcam?) and you're acting all put off. Would you prefer the teacher had just done whatever she pleased, and damn the privacy agreement made with parents?
This country has way too many lawyers.
Besides having to sign one of these this year, I also was sent home an "approved foods list" of things that children can bring to school for snack/lunch.
I know that it is because of allergies, but it only has about 11 things on it and none of them are especially healthy. I think that my school must be sponsored by Nabisco.
(sorry, that's a little Off topic, but I am considering homeschooling more and more every day..)
I work for a public school district and it is standard policy to prohibit the publishing, transmission, or public dissemination of images of students without prior written parental consent for each medium/release (i.e. if you want to include an image of students on a flier advertising a drama production, and another image of the same students advertising the same production on a school website, you will need to have two different forms signed by the parents of the students). And all these forms are kept on file for years.
In this day and age students are sending their photographs all over the Internet where the images will remain forever, but the districts/schools need to do this to protect themselves from lawsuits. Yes, really.
There are also forms that parents need to sign to allow their children to use the Internet. In high school. Again, this really is standard policy at public school districts.
Shorter request: "Can you make this more like TV?"
And that's what school children need, more TV!
-- MrJM
The problem is not that the teacher protects her students' images and privacy concern, as far fetched und paranoid they may be.
What's really galling is the idea that the author should broadcast his image, but not getting an image of its own.
That's a despicable disgard of common courtesy, like not offering someone else a seat while sitting, using the informal form while expecting to be replied to in the formal form and the like.
when did Skype start requiring the use of a webcam? Pretty sure that's an option not a must- have.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around requiring technical assistance in not filming oneself.
#'s 5, 7 & 9 all have this right. This is over the internet, and parents probably had to give their permission. And it goes beyond pedophiles looking at pics of kids - bad divorces, restraining orders, and dangerous parents that aren't allowed near their kids really do exist. My daughter had a friend whose father wasn't even allowed to know where she lived or went to school. And at that same school, the principal more than once had to physically interfere with parents trying to illegally remove kids from schools.
Yeah, it's sad that the author can only have a one-way visual feed for the conference call, but it's even sadder that some kids have very dangerous parents.
As an educator, this totally doesn't surprise me. Getting approval to take video or photos of kids in a school setting is very difficult. So her request makes total sense to me.
Also, it's easy to just disable your camera from your end on Skype, while having the other caller turn on their camera. We do it all the time for meetings with colleagues and partners over skype where they aren't in a place where they can broadcast video for privacy reasons.
It's called tv. It is normal for the audience to be unseen and anonymous. What exactly is the problem?
The problems I'm having with calling this "taking photos or videos of the students and putting them up on the web" is that this is exactly NOT what's going on.
Unless the scary parents are standing in the authors office viewing his screen, they are not seeing anything and get no chance to pick them up from a website or something.
Which means we're back to "CAMERAS STEAL OUR CHILDRENS SOULS OMG"
To answer the teacher's question: When the author calls you, click on "answer" instead of "answer with video."
I must be missing something... someone please link up this mysterious interwebsite where people's Skype calls are published.
Let's give the teacher some credit. She had to do this for obvious (though stupid) legal reasons and was probably asking if it was OK with the author to do a one-way video call, nor whether it was technically feasible or not.
I've never used Skype, but it was also my understanding that this is primarily a voice service, and video is optional (as with most chat programs). I'm not really bothered by the teacher's concern, but I am bothered by their apparent failure to familiarize themselves with basic technology, especially technology that a stranger will be using to set up a conference with her students.
What if the author just lied? "Oh yeah, sure I can't see you and I sure am not selling this video steam to skeevy websites."
And yes, if you want to see the author (which I know I'd prefer for most kids; they like having a visual focus) but not have him see you, just turn the freakin' webcam to the wall. Or put it in a drawer. Or drape a cloth over it.
I'm pretty baffled by the simplicity of this teacher.
Are there skeevy web sites that specialize in video of bored fourth-graders sitting in a classroom?
Let's give the teacher some credit. She had to do this for obvious (though stupid) legal reasons and was probably asking if it was OK with the author to do a one-way video call, nor whether it was technically feasible or not.
You're probably right. A reasonable question, since it's apparently un-OK enough to warrant writing about.
People get a clue and realize that not everyone in the universe is familiar with the intricacies of videoconferencing in 3... 2... 1...
The solution I see here is to instead have the author sign a form agreeing to not publish, distribute, or in any other way make available the images/video he will receive from the school. That's really the only "danger" I see in this situation, and even then I somehow doubt that there's a large market for videos of kids sitting and listening to someone talk. I get the feeling the teacher really hasn't thought this through. If I was the author, I don't think I'd speak. Especially with young kids, the interaction aspect would be too important.
This is one of those biased memes you see popping up every now and again that seems outrageous until you take a moment to understand the rationale.
All school districts have strict policies about pictures or videos of students being taken at school. Legally, permission is required from every student's parent in order to take video of them.
For instance, when an author visited my child's school, a permission slip was sent home asking if it would be OK for my child to appear as an audience member in a video that the author was making. Those that declined were seated so that they wouldn't show up on the video. As a parent, I didn't mind if my child appeared in the video, but I appreciated the concern.
Taking a video of the children and transmitting it via Skype to an unsecured third party (ie, the author) would reasonably be expected to fall under such a policy. Arguments about encryption, inability to do video capture via Skype, inability to repost, etc all utterly miss the point. It's a SCHOOL DISTRICT POLICY, and the teacher would be liable to lose her job (or at least get one godawful tonguelashing) if even one parent complained about it.
Fear is the enemy.
So the rationale is that some parents didn't sign a waiver? Does this mean that the school security cameras switch off whenever one of these students pass by? There is a difference between published media and internal use.
And by the way -- one of the job hazards teachers have to deal with is wingnut parents over-reacting to garbled anecdotes delivered by their third-grade students.
Kind of like the people reacting with outrage to this half-told, garbled story.
(PS -- Full disclosure ... I am a fan of Free Range Kids, and usually love their stuff. I just hate one-sided stories like this.)
@bwchicago --
Put yourself in the teacher's shoes. Would you really want to be explaining the fine points of the difference between Skype and published media when you're sitting the district superintendent's office, and your job is on the line?
If so, you're a braver soul than I.
Technology is always leapfrogging past our policies. As the technology becomes more familiar, bureaucracies slowly adapt. As soon as we get a few Principals and Superintendents who have actually *used* Skype, you can expect the policy to change.
Someone wants to teach 4th graders, more power to them. A teacher who invites an author for a virtual visit, more power to her. People's brains work very differently, and very basic (to us) "geek skills" on a computer (or camera) are daunting and frightening to others. The teacher works for a beauracracy that's likely big, overreaching and stupid, but she's trying to educate her kids and doing something cool. She has to make her uberbosses happy, try to not freak out paranoid parents or maybe she is just overprotective. Cut her some slack. It's a challenging, underpaid, underappreciated gig, and she deserves all the support she can get.
Easy! Have all the kids wear masks. I'll be happy to help with the design.
I understand (but don't necessarily agree with) the concerns on the part of the teacher/district/parents. However, if I were this author, I would decline the request to speak, as without two-way video, the interaction becomes very one-sided. There's no way for the author to get feedback from the students--everything has to be filtered through the teacher, including their reactions. (So he has no idea if they're bored, for starters.) At this point, you might as well just have the students submit questions and let the author record a video where he answers them. It's not that far removed from that.
@17 Nope. This was a live-chat between an author and one very distinct audience and there was supposed to be direct interaction.
You may still argue that it is okay when the audience talking to the author stays invisible to him and we'd simply disagree, but it is most decidedly not TV.
Or, to come at it from an entirely different but equally paranoid angle ... maybe she's not really a teacher. Maybe it's a freaky fan who just wants a private interview with his/her favorite author.
Honestly, the regulations in school districts are very extreme, and they are forced to cater to the loudest parent in the district... Nature of the beast.
I work in IT in a pretty good (not great) school district, and there is the possibility of a point on the side of the teacher - "can skype support a one-way webcam 'video' call?" (the author has a webcam, the class computer does not, is this a requirement for a "video" skype call).
For a district to put pictures of students on the internet, they need waivers signed by the parents, and if this teacher is unfamiliar with SKYPE, her concern can be reasonable (until she is explained how SKYPE works)... Trust me, there are parents that will sue over less. Literally, attempt to sue the district.
This teacher is likely working outside the purvue of her IT group, so it likely doesn't reflect on the ability of their IT department. It might, but it might not...
@34
Or maybe its a colony of alien lizard people who want to show their children what their prey looks like, but aren't bright enough to figure out skype...
I have no idea where that came from.
@32 I disagree that the author should have declined the request. From the story, it sounds like the author was in the process of setting up the call. That means you have a classroom full of expectant students, who likely have read the author's book(s) and are looking forward to the call. Pulling out at that point would just punish the kids for a school policy.
I agree that the visual feedback of seeing your audience makes for a much better presentation. But from the author's perspective, removing the video makes it much like a conference call. And authors have been using conference calls to interact with fans, students, and book clubs for years.
I work for a publisher of YA and children's books and my job just happens to be setting up school and library visits for our authors. Many schools and authors are just now starting to explore videoconferencing as a way to connect students with the authors of the books they love. None of our authors have yet experienced problems like this. Either they were dealing with schools with less paranoid or more tech-savvy policies, or maybe the participating students had to have their parents sign a permission slip. I'm not sure, but it's something I'll be sure to watch for from now.
By the way, School Library Journal just published an article on author Skype visits:
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6673572.html
This woman is a teacher. Of children. She is a good person. She probably was asking if it was okay with author, not if it was technically possible. Giver her a break.
The point isn't that the teacher was wrong, or even that the rule is wrong in certain contexts (reporters taping on campus, etc.).
The problem is that all encompassing, zero-tolerance rules make people's brains turn off.
No knives at school? Get expelled for having a a box of silverware in your car or a plastic knife in your lunch.
No videotaping kids without parental permission? Treat a book author as a pedophile instead of just saying, "Don't record the video stream and that will be great"
There is bad stuff on the internet? Block all streaming media and any images linked in from image hosting services (my wife's school does this - she can't show use *any* internet video sources to supplement lectures and any sites that have pictures hosted on Flickr or many other sites are filled with broken image links).
In short, it's easier to make sweeping rules and follow them mindlessly that it is to employ any common sense.
@35
From Torchwood, "Children of Earth"
Reptilian aliens that can travel to earth, beam an "ambassador" to us, but have to get humans to gather the human children into herding pens rather than just beaming them up...
coop
All the reasons why she should/shouldn't have requested this aside, not being able to see the kids faces is not the end of the world. It sounds like before the author suggested Skype, they were considering teleconferencing. Can you see the kids over the phone? No? Can you still get meaningful interaction? Sure!
Now, making it better than the phone, the author has implicitly agreed to transmit live video of himself reading. Great! All the better! But the kids, and their parents, haven't agreed to be videoed. So what? It'll still be a good experience.
Odd how two sentences from an elementary school teacher spawned so much blather. I support the "teacher wants to do something cool, but must contend with the uncertainties of school policy" camp.
#36
I know we hate to "punish" kids for something that completely not their fault and out of their control, but that was the point of my comment. If the author agrees to these stupid concessions, then no one is actually made aware that there's a problem--not the administration and certainly not the parents. If a school has trouble getting author bookings because of a paranoid and outdated policy, then they'll be more motivated to change it to something more productive.
Honestly, permission slips that said "your child's class will be having a video conference over the Internet with a famous children's author. Would you like them to participate?" would have done the job nicely without raising that many privacy concerns.
You know, this really bothers me. With policy regarding newer technology, we need to look to similar analogue situations for guidance.
Can the author come in for a visit to the classroom without specific parental permission? As a teacher, I'm going to say, yes, that would be permissible in a typical school.
Essentially we are taking the authors optic nerve and stretching it through the internet. There is no publication or even recording of images or video here, just seeing.
It's so sad that the teacher even thought to ask this...we're raising a generation of people who can't act or decide on their own, under fear of legal consequences. (That in reality are rarely applied because the actual application of the law happens much less frequently than our own self-policing)
@38
Never seen it. Must be the zeitgeist.
Leaving the teacher and author alone for a second, the bigger issue is simply that this is where we've come to as a culture, and it sucks. It's ridiculous how legalistic everything is. I get the logical flow of WHY it's that way, and it's retarded, stupid, dumb, unhelpful, unhealthy, backwards. I grew up going back and forth between Mexico and the U.S.- as a kid, the US's superiority over Mexico was obvious in every way- better junk food, better cartoons, better toy stores. Now, Mexico has achieved a lot of that stuff, and I yearn for the wonderful bits of the past, one of which was that people could be people and kids could be kids and no one had to worry about a million idiotic details spawned from an overly legalistic and technology-centric populace. I know there's good and bad to every place and time, but there is something severely unhealthy with This American Life...
spare the ira glass jokes, please...
no big deal: over-worked teacher says something without thinking it through first. If I had nickel every-time i saw it I'd be a millionaire many times over.
Thanks, Rotwang!
There is now spewed coffee on my monitor and keyboard.
#31, Jack Daniel: Easy! Have all the kids wear masks. I'll be happy to help with the design.
Better yet, dismiss all child-related 'OMG Pedos be stealin' my childrens' faces!' hysteria with child-sized Niqābs; all of the time outside the family home.
Or stop being frightened of our own shadows.
Oh yeah, the teacher would need to have a doctorate in computer science to figure out how to unplug or divert the web cam if that was really an issue.
Why do people work so hard to defend stupid?
Those who arguing that it's just Skype, and that the video will only be seen between the author and the class are missing one fundamental fact. You're going to transmit video of the kids over a network you don't have control of. No one, including Skype themselves, but especially the teacher, can guarantee that the video stream won't be hijacked, perhaps with a man-in-the-middle attack. Maybe just sniffed as it passes unencrypted over the public Internet.
@27, The school presumably has complete control over the security camera network and can make the guarantee as to the use of that video stream.
To criticize the teacher for being concerned over the privacy rights of her students and with their parent's wishes and concerns is misguided.
But yea the teacher could have just turned the camera around, tape it up, or just unplugged it.
I agree that Zero tolerance is totally evil, and probably partially to blame. That's the reason that kids with asthma can't actually carry their inhalers anymore, because they are considered drugs, and need to take the extra time going to the nurse (if the school has a nurse) to be able to breathe.
@41
I actually agree with you, in a sense. I think that if this issue had come up during the scheduling and negotiation process, the author should have said, "No, that's not cool." And the school would either have to change their policy or come up with a permission slip that covered it. But pulling out moments before the visit would have punished the students. And yes, that is a punishment and not a "punishment". No quotes are necessary. These visits are considered a treat by many students, especially when it's an author they enjoy. Taking that away at the last minute would be just plain mean. The thing to do is to go through the visit. And then, when planning your next Skype visit, be damn sure to ask about that and make sure there are no surprises.
This author definitely did me a favor, as I'll be warning my authors (at least the ones who do videoconferences) about this possibility.
why not just conference call with a picture of him up on a projector, like they do for war correspondants.
and if this isn't going to be televised, or have any photo's taken, would they actually need release forms?
@30 - agree 100% props to anyone chooses to be a teacher in this country.
@34 - nice idea for a story.
slight strawman from the author on :
>Truly, I am speechless. I'm just glad this won't be an in-person school visit, because it would be really awkward wearing a blindfold all day, lest I actually lay eyes on these kids.
like if they'd expected to visit the school and record it onto video, then would they be "truly speechless?".
#47, ALDASIN, please don't be a sphincter.
I know many excellent teachers who are clueless about technology.
Well, sure, of course! All those other government run web cams are all one way: They get to look at us, we don't get to look back. Just because it's a school and not a police station, you think the agenda is going to change?
Technology makes it easier for people to be buttheads. I see do things in their cars they'd never consider doing as a pedestrian, and cell phones in crowded public places-let's not start.
The phone company has been pushing TV-phones at us for 50 years- there's good reason to have resisted.
In *my* day, we sent snail-mail letters to our favorite authors, and read the responses aloud in class. If you're going to have a career day, choose a medium appropriate to the occasion.
(someone should send the teacher a copy of _The_Transparent_Society_)
One thing about Skype that could be a potential concern is that Skype has no central servers: it operates on a peer-to-peer model. Skype relays its traffic through other online Skype users' connections. I've run packet captures of my attempts to connect to Skype and seen it trying various IP addresses around the world. When you use Skype, you really have no idea whose connection your traffic is going through (or conversely, whose traffic you may be relaying yourself). So in a way, a Skype video call could be considered a broadcast. The traffic is encrypted, but the algorithm is proprietary and there is a very good chance that it has been broken.
Luckily, dougp @19 has pointed out the solution: you can indeed receive video without showing your own.
If I were a teacher, I'd barricade myself in my classroom after reading this:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/11/26/innocent-teacher-for.html
Just type 'teacher porn' into the BB search box for multiple articles about this atrocity.
I also should have mentioned that it would have been a moot point at the school my wife teaches at and the ones my kids attended - there is no way Skype would have been allowed on any of their computers in the first place.
@#72
That was the first thing I thought of too. Julie Amero lost her career, and that was a positive outcome compared to the 40 years in prison she was facing after being convicted of various felonies.
The teacher in this story doesn't deserve the snark, if you ask me. If I were an American school teacher, I'd be paranoid as hell too.
Amazing how some commentors here react to the teacher's "overreaction" with such vitriol and smugness.
I'm the webmaster (volunteer) for a public elementary school. In this county, parents can opt to not allow the school to share a likeness or the voice of their kid online. If one parent in a class does this, then I can usually edit that kid out of a photo, but I would have to gag the kid and sit him or her behind the web cam in this Skype situation.
This may not be a case of the school being over-protective, but of the parents being over-protective.
As a teacher in one district, and a School Board vice president in another, I can assure you that the probability that this is the fault of stupid policy is MUCH, MUCH higher than the probability that this is a stupid teacher.
If that's the case, then it's YOU, the voter, who is to blame,k for electing people who write policies that don't allow for useful modern technologies to be used in useful ways which are safe as needed -- that, and the parents who requested the "no media recording or TRANSMISSION" policy which surely lies behind this. Stop lashing out at teachers, who are on average smarter than many readers seem to be assuming -- for SHAME, boingboingers! -- and save your holier-than-thou vitrol for the voting booth, and the PTO meeting, and thus make sure this never happens again.
Good privacy type question, would have to agree with the idea not pointing random cameras at a room full of kids. Seems like the author should be aware of school policies too, target audience kind of thing? @54, 67, right, same as conf call plus video of him basicly.
I totally disagree with #66 posted by zantony,
I think the author SHOULD pull out at the last minute for being asked to abide by such rules, thus absolutely PUNISHING the students.
Or maybe begin the chat and explain why s/he cannot continue, then cut it short. Otherwise the problem is not made visible to the children - they are not made to intimately feel the edges of their freedom meeting the brick wall of control.
They need to SUFFER BECAUSE of the stupid RULES, so that they grow up politically radicalized and pissed off that adults have made so many assinine rules denying them the basic right to engage via technology with other human beings.
If enough people refuse to play these kinds of games we will eventually get our rights back.
It's hardly a random camera.
Not random, ok, good point. But as #64 and 71 said its not 100% certain? #8 nails it, would probably be thinking the same kind of thing there. Chances are real small but kids, liability, ?
I'm not sure if I would want to participate in an interview like that either. I saw a discussion panel in an auditorium recently- it would be silly if everyone was blindfolded, or if we weren't allowed to see them to protect privacy. I've had to justify my use of a camera to security guards while taking pictures of friends in public. This was at a museum and their concern was over copyrighted artwork or museum patrons' privacy. -though I wasn't photographing artwork, and only people I knew.
Once at an art show, a guest of my studio had no qualms about taking pictures of my artwork or me without asking, but she was taken aback at the notion of my taking a snapshot of her. People have been told not to photograph EMPTY playgrounds or swimming pools lest they use the photos for sinister purposes- although no children were present.
Why didn't this teacher simply decline the use of Skype and offer a text or voice chat instead and explain her concerns about the school's privacy policy- not that anyone can even view a private cam stream on Skype anyway. I know why she made such a proposal, but it's truly absurd.
Why all of a sudden do we fear cameras? What surreal movie have we woke up in? For once I'd like to go just one full day and enjoy myself without someone reminding me of some stupid restrictive rule. We are regulating ourselves to death, and to protect what? We live in strange times, and it's stranger with each day.
I dunno: I kinda feel like the teacher was asking the author if it was okay if they had their chat with her class not being able to be seen, not if it was possible. I'm a school librarian, and what the people who've talked about with the permission forms/privacy/psycho parents is all pretty much true.
Couldn't it be done without cameras, or is this one of those schools where it's assumed everything will be done with video at han?
Also, what happens when they get out into the real world, where no one is required to ask permission before using a camera? (Or, the other real possibility in some areas, walking through an area where something is being filmed.)