AUP Reflection

Activity 3: Discussion - Project - AUP Reflection

This week in graduate school we were researching Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) and even writing our own AUP for our school or district. I found this to be a rather difficult assignment. For something that parents and students had to sign it is practically a legal document and I have had no experience in this kind of writing. (My writing is about third grade level with my students most of the time.)    

            There are so many things to be included (so that my students or parents don’t try to loophole me.) I hate that I have to think this way, but my charter school has a very involved and very aggressive parent base. It’s pretty much the opposite of the never involved parent and it is definitely too much.

I tried to keep it as general and as open ended as possible. Many things fit under the umbrella of “show good character.” But if I were to list every single thing students could do to not show good character it would be a very long list and I would inevitably forget something and I could just see a student saying “but it wasn’t in the technology agreement that I couldn’t do this.”

I created my AUP for my classroom specifically and I definitely made good character the focus. We are a character school and pretty much everything we do revolves around character education. It is a really great way to tie everything together in my class and talk about making good choices; especially when it comes to technology.

When deciding what to put in my AUP I kept second-guessing myself. “Do I need this or do I need that?” I think if I had been actually creating this document for my school I would have been collaborating with other teachers, our technology director, and even administration. It’s just helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of when creating a document like this. I really like what I ended up putting together, but I think before I implement this in my classroom in the fall I will definitely run it past several other teachers to help me tweak it to perfection.

          One thing I really enjoy about these online classes is that I do have classmates to “work with.” I really enjoy looking through everyone else’s work and seeing all my classmates’ great ideas. It gives me an idea if I am going in the right direction with my own work.