Tech Talk: Storytellers--Talking Tech w/ Phil Dunn & Elizabeth Laird
We have another exciting show for you this week!<br><br>As part of the CDT Equity in Civic Technology Project's ongoing “Tech Tales series,” we are featuring perspectives from across the education system and sharing their experiences navigating the issues of privacy protection, responsible technology use, and digital equity in their daily lives as parents, school administrators, and education leaders. <br><br>Our guests will discuss how a collaborative approach to school technology is critical to ensuring students are safe and privacy is protected while learning online.<br><br>More on our host, Jamal https://bit.ly/cdtjamal<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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- students 0.020
- privacy 0.017
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- education 0.006
- parents 0.006
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- families 0.005
- information 0.005
- learning 0.005
Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. CT.
Tea. As part of CDT's equity and civic technology projects ongoing tech tale series, we are featuring perspectives from across the education system and sharing their experiences navigating the issues of privacy protection, responsible technology use, and digital equity in their daily lives as parents, school administrators, and education leaders. Our guests will discuss how a collaborative approach to school technology is critical to ensuring students are safe and privacy is protected while learning online.
Phil, thank you so much for being here today. Now to kick us off, tell us a little bit about your experiences working with Broward during COVID nineteen and the ways you've engaged education technology during this time.
Thanks for having me. So I'm Philip Dunn, chief information officer of Broward County Schools. I also go by Philip, so that's fine. And to answer your question, I think COVID has been a pretty interesting experience for basically the whole world. I know in the education sector, it's it's challenged us on a number of fronts. Most specifically, and I kinda like to tell it as a story where when schools in The United States first closed in Broward County, which is the sixth largest public school district in the nation, we actually shut down on Friday, 03/13/2020. So weird day. Right? Friday the thirteenth. So immediately, there became a really relentless focus on just asking the question of how do we provide access to education for kids given that the pandemic necessitates that we close physical facilities. And that translated into a number of different challenges. One of which was we ended up giving out over a 130,000 laptops to our population of over 275,000 students in public and charter schools. Just getting that number of laptops organized, staged, we were a district that was we were funded to have two and a half students for every one laptop. And now we suddenly had to go one to one, which is typically something that districts plan for, in some cases, over a year to do in terms of how they're actually going to get that number of computing devices, get them out to kids, get kids from as young as pre k age logged into a computer for the first time and and all of that. So that was just a huge lift getting the laptops out the door. Then the next kind of challenge that we realized was that not every student has access to reliable high speed Internet at home. So we ended up distributing over 3,000 wireless hotspot devices to students. And what was challenging was we had already had a deployed base of almost 3,000 cellular phones to our high school students. And when we shut down, we realized that now we needed to expand the scope of students that we distributed those devices to, a, but then, b, most people couldn't even get their hands on a wireless hotspot when COVID first hit the nation in in the world because there were these crazy supply constraints for technology products. So not only educational bureaucracies that were dealing with this challenge, it was businesses, the financial sector, banking, other, you know, sec medicine that was dealing with this and shifting to telemedicine. So the whole world wanted to get their hands on laptops, hot spots, data access, and then these these goods. And we were in the stream of commerce trying to do the same, so that was really challenging. And then the last really big challenge, and I'm kinda putting them in, like, like, buckets of lanes. The last big challenge was the the change management. Just the human side of change that for many of our educators and many of our students who had them now relying on technology to access educational services. And we were trying to figure out what did that mean, what would school look like. In most cases, we had students learning within, you know, now a home environment. We've never done that before. We've never interacted with students, synchronously inside their homes. How would we deal with some of what we found in their homes? How would we support students and make them feel, you know, like there was some normalcy in their education? And that pretty much has been where most of the day to day challenges have lied after, last summer. So that was a kind of big framing, but that's complex problem we dealt with.
So you mentioned we're approaching the one year mark, and it's it's hard for me to even imagine that we've been doing this for a year so far. But can you reflect on an example of how education technology and data have played a positive role in helping students? And and then can you do the opposite? Can can you talk about a privacy risk that has a potential to harm students?
Yeah. No. That's a great question. So I think the technology has played a positive role in so much as it has provided some sense of normalcy through the maintenance of educational services during this period of unprecedented unnormalcy. We saw in the wake of the pandemic, some students go abroad, return to home countries, you know, accessing educational services at all times, day and night. And what really made us proud was we had a high level of student interaction with our educational services, you know, across time and space. And and that impact writ large across the system of hundreds of thousands of students really made us feel proud to be one of the few institutions in this modern time, in this pandemic that can still continue to connect with people and provide value in their lives, you know, each and every day. So being a source of normalcy, it was really, I think, one of the biggest points of pride and one of the biggest, promises that the technology demonstrated because it allowed us to do that. And there were some school districts that didn't succeed at that. For example, there were some districts around the nation that couldn't get their hands on the technology, couldn't figure out how to provide educational services virtually. And in those cases, those districts just had no connection with some students for some period of time. So we're proud that the technology empowered our ability to connect to students day to day and create normalcy. The peril, the challenge, right, I don't wanna say downside, but peril with student data privacy is is a number of things, actually. I think one is we live in an idiom or we live in a time where we have access to an idiom, I e, the digital world, where things just persist forever, and they're actually quite difficult to remove. So one of the challenges we're realizing is that, you know, how are we ensuring appropriate behavioral norms within the digital space? And in some measures, the consequences of not doing that successfully are far greater than the physical space. So if you act out in the physical space or have an outburst, you know, in a normal classroom, you know, people will have reaction and it's something that happened that day. Kids will go home, tell their parents this crazy thing happened today. But in the digital space where lessons are often recorded or students can, you know, pick up a cam a camera phone and Mhmm. Record what's going on, you know, there's this fear that now we're creating these persistent memorializations of human interactions and human behaviors. And for our students whose very purpose for being in our educational system is that we can educate them, we can raise their level of awareness and sophistication about the importance of certain behavioral norms and expectations. Do they have access or do they have room to make a mistake is is kind of the question we ask ourselves. And how do we provide the appropriate supports so that this can still be an educational environment of relatively low stakes or at least stakes that are temporarily bounded. So the crazy thing that happened in class today is just that it's not going viral. It's not, you know, being shared around the world and, you know, people are dealing with the stigmas. So yeah.
That's to to know that a mistake made in a classroom could potentially live with you forever is is a little unsettling, I'll be honest. And and you touched on this a little earlier, but I wanna go back to the digital divide as it continues to be a huge learning barrier to students across the country. Efforts to close the digital divide have privacy related implications. How do you design learning strategies that combat digital inequality and simultaneously maintain student privacy protection and particularly for those most vulnerable?
Wow. That's that's a little bit of question. Yeah. So, yeah, if I'm understanding correctly, it's how do you design educational strategies that maintain student privacy protections and protect those that are that are the most vulnerable? And that's that's challenging. This is it's especially challenging in a COVID world. Right? Because and this isn't just Broward. I'm speaking generally in education. One of the things we've struggled with is in shifting to digital, we're now, as I said earlier, going into people's homes. And it's creating new modalities of interaction, not just with students, but with families now that we never really conceptualize. Like, we were kinda just thrown into this lake of here's a pandemic and, like, now swim. You know? And it's like, oh my gosh. There's some sharks we never thought were in this lake. You know? So what it's what it's amounted to for us in terms of privacy protection is it's had it's required us to be a lot more explicit with what we expect from students in a home environment and also what we expect from people who may be in the home that are not students. Right? Because if I'm now you're my teacher, I'm online, and I have a family member, what's the scope of their ability to see the classroom, to interact in the classroom? We wouldn't just let random people come and stand outside the door of a school classroom, you know, and and disrupt the learning environment or, you know, how do other parents feel that their kids could be seen in in in the learning environment by other people that may not even be parents, may not even be a member of the school community. So so that's been a big challenge, and our reaction has been thinking through a lot of behavioral protocols that we communicate to teachers and that we communicate to families and people who are members of the school community so that we can maintain the integrity of the school community. I think, additionally, the other challenge that we've we've been seeing is thinking about, you know, what's the line between healthy data tracking and analytics Mhmm. Juxtapose against what is unproductive and somewhat intrusive data tracking analytics? Because now that we're delivering services through technology, it does create going back to that persistent footprint I talked about. Right? Yeah. Those create a lot of artifacts. Right? Like, I can see when people log on. I can see what they consume while they were online. I can see how long they were online for. You know, you can then start running that through clearing houses of, okay, here's your academic record. Here's your this. Here's your that. And I think it's forcing a conversation more now about what is the scope about what is the scope of how we're going to use this information to improve educational services for students? And then how do we avoid the perils of nonvalue added uses of the information? Right? Like, we don't wanna be in a world where we're tracking people based on real time behaviors. Oh, yeah. Or where I don't I I hazard to even think of some of the other poor uses of that information. Or for example, we don't wanna be in a world where we over rotate on implementing research based strategies where we might say, hey. If you consume this lesson for fifteen minutes, that's what the research says is good. And now we're gonna, like, sit there and track you as if you were online for fifteen minutes on this thing. You know? It's it's not gonna be received well by the person that we're intending to help. So we're thinking more about what the future looks like given this capability.
That is wow. That I I think there's there's definitely a lot of privacy implications that we should be looking that we should really be paying attention to, early on that I don't think we were we were as as aware of, you know, prior to this this COVID world that we've now entered.
Yeah. I would I kinda put up, like, a concluding idea on that thought in the sense that, you know, when you think of paradigm shifting you know, technologies or innovations, right, like, it's usually the product of a lot of people working in concert for a long time to realize it, where they've already thought through what the it looks like. Right? Like, we just put a rover on Mars the other day, and people spent, like, years of their lives. Like, here's what we think it's gonna look like. Here's what is gonna happen when it lands, and here's what we do. Right? But then when you have innovation catalyzed by a pandemic, right, by, It's like you really didn't think through what the other side looks like. You just kinda threw yourself out there, and you kinda discover things as you go, you know, that you have to then react to, which is challenging.
So switching gears a little bit, and and talk and I wanna touch on third party ad tech vendors because they're providing critical support services, you know, during this pandemic, but they also share the responsibility of maintaining strong privacy protection. So what's your approach to selecting and adopting EdTech tools? How do you think about establishing productive relationships with the vendors, and and where do you start?
Yeah. So that's a great question. It always starts with the needs. I like to analogize it to you tend not to just walk out to the supermarket and buy things randomly. You you wanna like, what am I eating this week? You know? For how we're looking for this. You know? So so we really start by understanding our organization through its strengths, one, and then through its opportunities, two. So if our strength is, for example, a particular academic program or it's a subject area or it's a kind of just broader community programmatic event, then we think about what do we need in the way of resources to continue growing from that strength. One example I I'm really proud of in Broward that we got up off the ground was, we have a parent university that we spun up in the middle of the pandemic that uses virtual workspace technologies over the Internet to persistently engage parents and hold these, like, large virtual events, at scale on a recurring basis for parents. We also created a drop in, tutorial center using some of the virtual workspace, machine learning, and other technologies we we have access to. So in those examples, we thought about our ability to our great strength to be able to provide wrap around supports to students and their families. And then we said, okay. Now what technologies can help us realize, could either make easier what we're already doing or could help us realize the evolution of that vision to deliver these services? And then from there, that's where you get into the you know, speaking to vendors and kind of understanding how they can help your mission, how they'd help you fulfill your objectives. And at some point, you mentioned the data privacy piece, which is where when vetting partners, we get very specific with regard to data elements that are transferred. We tend to look through any privacy disclosures. We leverage commonly accepted frameworks. So if it's one roster or something's LTI compliant, we know that, okay, this product generally works like this and transfers these data elements and provides these capabilities because it's working within that framework. So it starts with the high level thinking about us as an organization and, you know, what we're good at, what we're what we need to grow at. And then ultimately, it gets very, specifically focused on how a vendor structures their product from a technology standpoint to help us reach that goal.
So through the challenges of teaching, you know, during COVID, leaders like yourself have been prompted to reimagine the role of technology in education, both during the pandemic and when students return, hopefully, soon. What tech and privacy related lessons from the past year would you offer as we begin to imagine a post pandemic educational landscape?
That's a hard question. Yeah. Tech and privacy related lessons. I think, generally, as it relates to the technology, it's it's pushing us to think more about what do people want. And, you know, not only as it relates to academics, but what do families want as it relates to outcomes of their kids? How can we better use this interconnected world now to provide opportunities to people that transcend just where they happen to be sitting at or living at at the moment? You know, if you think of the educational system, it was really built on the concept of place. Right? You you Mhmm. Go to a school you tend to go to school in the community in which you live, and, you know, that created a certain landscape. And with the technology, it's really changing where we have to think about, you know, all the different things we'd want people to do that they formally couldn't in so much as this technology allows us to connect to people devoid of a place. How do we now accelerate those opportunities? And the privacy piece is, you know, kinda thinking forward in terms of the privacy piece. I think a lot of the thought around privacy is thinking going back to, like, how does school become a place to make mistakes without it, like, lasting forever? I think a lot of the privacy piece is also, at least from a technical perspective, as we've kinda gone through this pandemic and we've created a larger digital footprint, we're thinking on the side of how do we allow ourselves how do we structure ourselves technologically so that we can work with partners while disclosing the minimum amount of information possible? And how do we better protect the perimeter of our data so that, you know, if I work with a 100 different vendors, it doesn't mean that, like, your academic records are going out to a 100 different parties. You know? So on a technical level, that means we're looking at things with, you know, encrypted blockchain technology, internal we have some big moonshot ideas that are kinda bubbling up in the background on, like, how can we, again, let people into this environment to service students without just sharing data willy nilly with every partner in the world?
Yeah. Cool. Well, I can I can honestly say I'm happy some of this technology was not available when I was in school? Well, Phil, thank you so much for your time, and and thank you for joining us here today. And thank you for all the work you're doing uplifting and protecting students. We really appreciate it.
Likewise. Thank you so much. It's a great opportunity to chat with you.
Elizabeth,
thank you so much for joining me here today. Hey, Jamal. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back.
We're we're always glad you're back. So, Elizabeth, to kick us off, tell us a little bit about the Tech Tales series. What motivated this project, and how does it fit in with the rest of your team's work? Yeah. So I think like a lot of organizations,
last year, there was what we thought we were gonna do, and then there's what we actually did. And so we had our year planned out, and then, actually, almost a year ago now, you know, our world totally changed, and the way that students were being educated totally changed. And so we shifted our focus, to really, how do we support school leaders and parents and families as we transition to distance learning in the wake of COVID nineteen. And as we did that, we started to see some stories, about what was going well, but, more often, what was not going well. And so I think from our you know, as far as our organization goes and our project, we both believe deeply in the power of Dan technology and do not accept that it has to come at the expense of people's privacy and digital rights. And so way that this project fits in is by trying to tell the stories of those folks in the field who are most impacted by this, who oftentimes don't have a voice, in these conversations or a seat at the table, but are both experiencing the benefits of data and technology and how it's helped, their students or their child or their constituents in their state, but how they've also been able to protect, student privacy and ensure that their information is used responsibly, in service of them. And the reason that we wanted to really focus on that is, you know, the role of data and technology in our lives has never been more important. And last fall, we did research among parents, teachers, and students, and we found that among teachers and among parents, there is really strong support for online learning in the future even after the pandemic ends. Three and four parents and teachers support the increased use of online learning. And at the same time, there are still really significant privacy concerns that need to be addressed. And so we wanted to, respond to this growing interest and support for technology and show how you can protect privacy at the same time and that, it's not a false choice. You don't have to do one or the other. You really can do both. And so we wanted to tell the stories from folks in the field who are doing this firsthand.
The digital divide continues to be a huge learning barrier to students across the country. Moreover, efforts to close the digital divide have privacy relevant implications. How do you design digital learning strategies that combat digital inequity and simultaneously maintain student privacy protection, particularly for those most vulnerable?
Yeah, Jamal. I really appreciate that question, and I think that's exactly where we find ourself as a country with, a tremendous need and urgency to close the digital divide, especially with the classroom moving from the school building to the home. And, I'm not sure if you've seen it, but there are stories about, and and pictures of students in fast food parking lots, trying to do their their schoolwork and participate in distance learning and trying to use that fast food, restaurants, Wi Fi. So there are really dramatic and unfortunate, pictures that we've seen about what the real life impact of this is on on students and how it is getting in the way of them, maintaining connections and relationships with caring adults, continuing to to learn and receive educational supports and services. So there is a tremendous urgency to to close the digital divide and make sure that all students have, access to devices and high speed Internet. At the same time, a number of these strategies, that we see that schools and districts and states are deploying to your question. They really do have privacy implications. And some of the research that we've done, shows that schools really are stepping up. The same research I referenced earlier that we released last fall, showed that schools have doubled, the rate at which they are providing devices, and that's just based on last school year. We're gonna re be refreshing some of that information for this school year, and I think we expect to still see that number increase. So with with students having more devices, it begs the question of what information is being collected about them, who has access to it, and how it's being used. And similarly, on the Internet connection side, you know, in order for schools to help families get connected, they have to know, which families currently do not have access to, the kind of Internet that they need in order to participate in distance learning. And so that means collecting information about families. Sometimes that can include sensitive information like income, to see if they qualify for subsidies. And in some cases, that can mean sharing that information with Internet service providers in order to get them, access to subsidized or even free Internet. And so all of those things are important, and are are critical strategies in order to close the divide, but they also have privacy implications. And so, the good news is that privacy is not new in education. Schools every school has experience dealing with it. The main federal student privacy law that governs the protection of this information is from 1974. So they have decades of experience navigating these questions, but it's just important to pay attention to them in in this new context and that privacy cannot and should not be an afterthought, when you're giving out devices and when you're collecting sensitive information about families or even when you're sharing it with Internet providers. And there are ways, to limit any kind of information that's collected on school issued devices. And then similarly around collecting new information and potentially sharing it, you know, there are, examples of best practices around this, around really only collecting the minimum amount of information that you need. And if you're sharing it with a third party, making sure that you have in place the right agreements that really limit, what kind of information that they have access to, what they can do with it, that they don't get to retain it in perpetuity. They have to delete it after a certain period of time. And so a number of the privacy practices that existed before the pandemic really can come into play, in order to move with urgency that is is desperately needed to close the digital divide, but employ those best practices around privacy so that we're not creating new or different issues as it relates to protecting students' privacy in closing the divide. Wow. So
we've seen a lot of challenges of teaching, you know, amidst COVID. Education leaders have been prompted to reimagine the role of technology in education, both during the pandemic and when students eventually return to classrooms. What tech and privacy related lessons from the past year would you offer as we begin to imagine a post pandemic educational landscape?
Yeah. So I would think about, one one lesson learned, from the past year is, what I mentioned before, which is that, privacy and security and using data responsibly, is not a new issue in education. Now a number of the questions that we are grappling with in the context of COVID nineteen existed long before, the the global pandemic occurred. And I offer that as a lesson learned because there are existing organizations and research and resources and capacity that exists that can really come into play and support school leaders as they navigate some of the challenges that have come up in the past year. And I think that's important because, you know, we really, have been and continue to deal with an unprecedented event, and disruption to our education system. So I think it's important where we can to rely on existing capacity because privacy isn't new. There are resources available that schools should continue to avail themselves of. And then the second lesson that I have been, thinking about is just the importance of, governance and having in place the right people and processes through which to, think about and decide some of the issues that we've talked about today. You know, no one could have anticipated the kind of, transition and and and radical shift that we would have experienced over the past year, But you can put in place the right people and processes to be responsive to those things. And if I was still working in a state education agency or in a school district, that's the first thing that I would do is make sure that moving forward, you have in place the right people, policies, and processes, to make sure that as issues arise and they're gonna continue to arise, that you have a way to deliberate those things and and make the best decisions, to help protect students and their families. And then the third lesson, that I've been thinking about as it relates to the pandemic and what I hope we carry forward, as we imagine a post pandemic world is is really about what privacy means, in an educational setting and how we think about it. And, again, to hearken back to the research that we did with parents and teachers, you know, probably not surprisingly, privacy generally does not rank among the top concerns of, parents and teachers given everything that they have going on, especially in the context of COVID. But where they do care about it, and I think where we as an organization care about it the most and, you know, personally, what I do what I do is because privacy is really an issue of protecting students' safety and well-being. And, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we did see examples particularly around, Zoom bombing where an adult was able to infiltrate an online classroom and expose students to really inappropriate material or actions in ways that, you know, could further inflict trauma on them in this already, you know, disruptive environment where we're all just, you know, doing our best. Similarly, in North Carolina, the way that they were thinking about rolling out a student information system had the potential to out transgender students. And so privacy is not just an issue of legal compliance. It's not just a technical issue. It's not just, you know, the lawyer's job or your CIO's job. It's really everyone's job. And it really should be anchored and focused on centering students, and in particular, how do you keep them safe and protect their well-being so that they can become the best, you know, young adults, that they can be. And I I I I think that we saw some examples of how if we're not thoughtful about privacy, it can actually work at cross purposes of that. But I I hope that moving forward, we think about privacy, as part of our larger efforts to, you know, protect students and create a learning environment in which they are safe, they feel free to express themselves, they feel free to make mistakes and learn. And so I hope, you know, as we move forward, that that is our orientation around privacy, and we get out of this construct of it just being about FERPA or state privacy laws. You know, this is really about centering students and families and doing right by them.
Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me here today, and thank you for the work you do uplifting and protecting students. Thanks, Jamal. And, I look forward to hopping on here again. Of course. You know, our door is always open, so please come back when whenever you have a moment. Even if there's no real door because we're working remotely? Yes. Our virtual doors are always open.
Alright. Sounds good. I'll I hope to walk through your virtual door again in the future.
And for all our listeners, to learn more about CDP's equity and civic technology project, please visit us at cdp.org and on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at CDPM Tech. I'm Jamal Magby, and thank you so much for talking tech.
