Playing with my Voki: EULAs and E Safety

I am busily preparing an esafety assembly, a reminder about our Internet 3 Bees for tomorrow. As I was downloading images to share, as starting points around some of the sites I know my students use regularly I suddenly thought how useful it would be to show a EULA or part of one anyway, one of those documents that appear online when we register for a service that highlight our responsibilities as users. If you are like me I frequently flick through, these clicking the accept button, but since exploring web 2.0 spaces and how they might be used, and in the light of e safety concerns, I have been increasingly drawn to read through some of these, focussing as a primary teacher on the "age limitations" presented by those offering the service.

Tomorrow in revisiting our Internet 3 bees, I now feel that I need to draw these documents to the attention of colleagues and students alike, inorder model the need to involve parents when they want to engage in online activities and before entering into any online agreements. This is particualrly important for us in light of the fact that we use Think.com which has a rather lengthy EULA, that constitutes a contract between school and Oracle. It is easy to bypass these, in the midst of excitement about the potential of online tools but when visiting the Voki site this evening, I was reminded that the age limit placed in their site EULA is 13. This is also the case for sites such as MSN, Google and social networking sites but the wordy legalise of EULAs means they are not easily accessible and students and parents may not be aware of the responsibilities they have, or choose not to engage with them. Even though it would be a shame for such potentially powerful tools not to be used, in the primary sector it is really important that we are aware of these, and that because of this any use of such tools, be developed with and through parental partnership, or class based accounts, inorder that we comply with the EULAs presented.

Anyway having been the Mr Grumpy, I agreed to the EULA at Voki, (being just a little older than 13) and have had a play this evening adding part of one of our class podcasts as a backing track. I think it would be great to have a class designed character, who would be able to appear on our blog to share what we have been doing, or to celebrate in a different student's voice a particularly fine piece of work, or in a piece of news. Using Podium the track can be recorded very easily, and exported as an MP3, I am thinking it would be great to upload this file together as a class alongside their blog entry, and share with their parents.



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