My reflection is going to focus on the article “Privacy Concerns for Class Dogo and Other Tracking Apps for School Children” by Natasha Singer which can be found here:
The twitter essay that I did speaks on the main points of the article and looks at both the pros and cons of using an app such as ClassDogo in your classroom for tracking your students’ behaviour and using it as a tool for classroom management, which can be found here:
The first time I saw this type of behaviour modification strategy being used was while I was doing a three week placement in Nuneaton, England where students were given points based on specific expectations like attendance, submission of assignments on time, GPA, etc and every week a student was named “student of the year” based on whoever had the highest point that week. From the outcomes and student behaviour, it came across as a positive strategy to me because this caused students to be driven and motivated to be the student of the week. Attendance especially was very good in that school and not a lot of students missed many classes. The reason there was no issue with this strategy was that the points tracking was done on paper and was kept in the classroom and was only accessible to the students and the
teacher, so there was no issue of data tracking and being available to the open world. After reading this text, and seeing how useful this type of behaviour strategy can be, I prefer doing this type of class tracking non-digitally so that it completely avoids the issue of privacy concerns and data tracking, though I understand it is a lot more work for teachers to keep track of all their students manually, and not as easy for parents to have access to their child progress.
In conclusion, according to Singer’s article, parents are greatly divided on their views regarding use of apps like ClassDogo for tracking their child’s behaviour and progress. While some parents love the idea because its an easier and constant report on their child’s progress in school, other parents disapprove as they feel this can bring forth labels on their children and could lead to unforeseeable consequences. As I am not very tech savvy, or digitally aware as much as I should be, it was after reading this article I realized the seriousness of how usage of these apps have furthermore consequences such as data tracking that can be used for other purposes by a third party.