Parental Consent

I sent a parental consent package home with the students who are participating in my "pilot" blog program. I have modified the NYC Internet Parental Consent Form for my specific purposes. The package also includes a cover letter from me to the parents, and a listing of the privacy & etiquette rules, which must be signed by students & parents.

I've decided on my strategy for addressing the sometimes ambiguous, often overly paranoid Internet Acceptable Use Policy. Firstly, it is rather vague about rules for teacher websites:

Subject to district-wide policies and procedures, teachers may establish Web pages for use with class activities or to provide a resource for other teachers. Teachers will be responsible for maintaining their class or educational resource sites. Teacher web pages will not be considered official material, but will be developed in such a manner as to reflect well upon the Department, district and school.

Secondly, there is a prohibition against interactive chat rooms and "live bulletin boards" (whatever they are):

Bulletin Boards and Chatrooms
Since we cannot monitor live bulletin boards and chat rooms to assure safety of content, we will not accept any Web pages containing bulletin boards or chat rooms.

The way I read this statement, however, is that the DOE will not HOST these services, but I don't see the statement as an outright prohibition against students accessing a bulletin board. But what if we do read it as an outright prohibition? What exactly is a blog? Does it fall in the same category as bulletin board? I would argue that it is more like a website, since I have control over what gets posted and what gets deleted and so on. Of course this is also true of a bulletin board, so I'm not sure what the DOE is thinking. They can monitor a bulletin board or a blog for safety of content just as easily as an any other website. I'm guessing that by "live bulletin board" they are really referring to a chat room, but by using the term bulletin board, they have created a terribly ambiguous policy. I could easily see an administrator telling me to shut down my blog based on a misreading of this policy.

I can also argue that the blog format I am using is nothing more than a way to display student work on the web. I could conceivably accomplish most of my goals using traditional teaching methods - assign students to view the animation, then assign them to write a response, collect the student work that resulted, and post it on a website. Doing this would be unambiguously conforming to the IAUP. It would also be terribly inefficient and less effective.