Photos, Student Privacy, Media Literacy, and Digital Citizenship.
Photos, videos, and social media are integral to our lives. Schools are actively promoting media literacy and digital citizenship principles, but it is often difficult to put these teachings into practice. It’s important to teach students to make the right decisions and guide them with tools that encourage them to apply what they’ve been taught.
Photos are building blocks of our stories. With rapid advances in digital production software, from TikTok to ChatGPT, every photo has the likelihood of becoming someone’s derivative work. Every student’s photo shared on social media volunteers their personal identity and right to privacy. As AI progresses, it can eventually match the image to the individual. However, this does not mean we should forgo social media and stop using photos. Visual content is how we interact and communicate. We need to follow best practices for how we protect data privacy and content ownership, making users aware that their personal data is being shared, ultimately allowing them to give or withhold consent while we help everyone respect each other’s rights.
Vidigami provides a robust system that provides schools with up to five levels of consent management. Each level is color coded. Photos of a student with “no public release” consent is marked with an easy-to-use indicator for every photo they have been tagged in.
Additionally, there are two other way Vidigami can help model the appropriate use of media in the school. First, Vidigami lets users remove a photo from being shared by using the “Report Media” option. The reason for flagging the photo can be as simple as the student having a bad hair day and not wanting that image shared. Reported media is only visible to the school’s Vidigami admins. The admins will be able to see who reported the media and the reason why it was reported.
Vidigami also prevents photos from being downloaded with metadata. If the photos are shared publicly, no identifiable data will be attached.
Vidigami is a tool designed for and used by PK-12 schools. It has features that make organizing and sharing photos easy and help model best practices when using media inside and outside the school.
