More details on what's coming to Meet and Classroom

Editor’s note: On August 11, 2020 Google for Education kicked off a global back-to-school event, The Anywhere School. Check out the full recap of product launches and our collection of announcements.

Google has always aimed to invest in products, programs and philanthropy that make learning possible for everyone, anywhere. This year we’ve been especially inspired by the teachers and students around the world who have used our tools in new creative ways and at an unprecedented scale.


As schools start this next semester, we’re excited to share the many new capabilities we’re bringing to Meet and Classroom, to support teaching and learning, no matter where it’s taking place. Let’s start with what’s coming to Meet.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/the-anywhere-school-meet-classroom-updates/

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - Two years on

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is celebrating its second birthday. Here we take a look at how things stand two years in and what the future may hold for data protection law in the UK.

Making Sense of the GDPR - A Principles-Based Regulation

Anyone reading the GDPR for the first time could be forgiven for being unclear as to what is required for compliance. The recitals, which make up the first 30 pages, are a preamble to the main part and there are different views on the extent to which the recitals are legally binding. The main body of the GDPR contains a multitude of principles and requirements often expressed using open ended and, frankly, nebulous language.

However, to dismiss the GDPR in these terms would be doing it a disservice. The GDPR is a principles-based regulation. This means that compliance is not achieved not through following a series of prescriptive rules. Instead it is about applying the GDPR principles to how personal data is used in practice.

Take information security as a case in point. The GDPR requires organisations to implement "appropriate technical and organisational" measures to safeguard personal data taking into account factors such as developments in technology, cost, what's being done with the data, as well as the risks to individuals.

This gives organisations a wide latitude with regards to how they meet the security requirements. For example, some organisations allow staff to use their personal phones for work whilst others insist that corporate devices must be used. Either approach is compliant in principle, so long as appropriate steps are taken to safeguard personal data, for example, staff training and policies as well as technical controls to protect work related data held on the devices.

This flexibility is particularly important bearing in mind the GDPR applies, for the most part, to any organisation that handles or uses personal data. The GDPR principles need to be workable for both a small charity and a large multinational. The GDPR must remain fit for purpose and the principles based approach should help it to keep up with the breathless pace of change and technological development.

Making Money from Personal Data

It goes without saying that personal data has enormous value and there are challenges in monetising it in a way that is compliant with data protection law.

This is particularly the case in an online context and we anticipate that the use and exploitation of personal data online will continue to be a key GDPR battleground for many years. Stories in the news about how much money well known social media platforms allegedly make from the personal data of their users serve to illustrate how high the stakes are here.

In 2019 the ICO (the data protection regulator) announced a review of adtech and real time bidding (RTB), although this is temporarily on hold following coronavirus (COVID-19). In essence, RTB allows organisations to compete in real time to place adverts on a webpage or in an app. The bidding process typically involves using personal data of an individual (often collected through the placement of cookies) to place a targeted advert on the webpage or app that the individual has navigated to. For example, if an individual has visited websites that relate to home insurance then the successful bidder may display adverts related to home insurance products. The entire process just takes milliseconds.

RTB plainly raises significant privacy issues given that it can involve sharing a substantial amount of personal data with a large number of organisations, in circumstances where individuals may be unaware what is going on. Furthermore, RTB will often involve processing 'special category' personal data, for example, information about political views, religion, ethnicity or health.

Viewed in these terms, it is not surprising that the ICO has taken an interest. There is a tension between regulators such as the ICO which wants to ensure legal compliance and organisations looking to innovate and to leverage personal data using technology in ever more clever and sophisticated ways.

The ICO has, perhaps optimistically, stated that companies do not need to choose between innovation and privacy. The ICO appears to be at pains to emphasise that they want to find workable solutions and have said they understand the need to allow organisations to generate revenue through their websites. Such a pragmatic approach is to be applauded, although the ICO is standing firm on key data protection compliance issues in a way that some organisations may see as a barrier to innovation (for example, around getting consent).

Rights in Personal Data

An article on GDPR two years in would not be complete without consideration of the new rights that individuals now have thanks to the GDPR.

These new rights were seen to be amongst the most significant changes introduced by the GDPR. At first glance, the new rights do indeed represent a significant shift in the balance of power from data controllers to individuals by giving people much more control over their personal data. However, in our view the impact of these new rights has been limited. We've set out a couple of examples below.

• The 'right to be forgotten' allows individuals to request that the data controller delete their personel data. However, the right comes with so many caveats and exemptions that in our experience most requests do not have to be complied with and will only assist individuals in limited situations. For example, the right does not apply where processing of personal data is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest, this is likely to cover a lot of processing, particularly for public authorities.
• Similarly, the 'right to rectification' allows individuals to have inaccurate data corrected. However, for the most part, the right only applies to factual inaccuracies and, for example, cannot usually be used as a backdoor to getting a professional opinion changed or struck off the record.

Whilst the new GDPR rights may have enjoyed a quiet start, the right that an individual has to access their personal data (a subject access request or SAR) continues to enjoy far more prominence. SARs existed under the old 1998 Data Protection Act but the right has been enhanced by the GDPR. SARs are often made in relation to a wider dispute or claim, and are powerful tools that can be used to force disclosure, particularly in relation to disputes and complaints. SARs can also take up a significant amount of time and resources so organisations should ensure that they have processes in place to manage them efficiently and that they are aware of the exemptions from disclosure available.

Brexit and Beyond

The GDPR is a European regulation and EU and UK data protection laws will remain aligned during the transition period. At the end of the transition, the GDPR will become part of domestic UK law.

Ostensibly, both the UK Government and the EU are committed to continuing close alignment on data protection. The UK is seeking an 'adequacy decision' from the European Commission. This would be a decision by the Commission that UK data protection law meets EU requirements and an adequacy decision will help ensure continued free flow of personal data between the UK and the EU. Whether such a decision will be forthcoming before the end of the year remains to be seen. In light of COVID-19 and the wider discussions around the UK's relationship with Europe, granting the UK an adequacy decision may not be at the top of the EU's priority list.

Unless the UK receives an adequacy finding, there will be more barriers when transferring personal data from the EU to the UK. For example, in many cases businesses will need to ensure that their contracts with European partners incorporate the European Commission's model wording for international data transfers.

However some steps will be required whether or not there is an adequacy finding, for example, some businesses will need to appoint a representative in Europe if they offer goods or services to individuals in the EEA or are monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EEA.

As such, UK organisations that do business in Europe will need to comply with both the EU GDPR as well as UK data protection laws. This may become more onerous over time if EU and UK data protection laws diverge.

In a written statement to the UK Parliament in February regarding the government's approach to negotiations with the EU, Boris Johnson stated that the UK "will in future develop separate and independent policies" including in respect of data protection. It is not clear whether this is a long term aspiration or whether the UK will immediately forge its own path.

It remains to be seen whether UK data protection law will stay aligned with Europe or whether it will go its own way, with a more independent (and possibly light touch) approach to data protection regulation. The data protection landscape may look very different in two years' time.

Andrew Gallie

Ten Things Every Teacher Should Be Able To Do On Google Classroom

Relax! Not specialising early could be your key to success

There is a widely held belief that to be successful you have to specialise early and focus all your efforts in one area. To dabble or delay just means getting left behind. Or does it?

In Don’t Tell Me The Score, the best-selling author David Epstein explains why the best way to succeed is to sample widely, gain a breadth of experiences and take detours. It’s never too late for a career change or to discover that new hobby you love. You might just be amazing at it.

Read more here

Summaries of Educational Research

There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access.   I’ll keep adding to it as I find things and when people make suggestions:

A collection for easy access 

Over 40 ways to teach DIT

A useful little guide for the BTEC Award in DIT click here

Why coding matters

By Simon Peyton Jones, Chair, National Centre for Computing Education

In his March 2019 blog post, Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education at the OECD, asks “Should schools teach coding?”, somewhat misreported in the press as “Teaching children coding is a waste of time, OECD chief says”. But it’s a good question.

Let’s start at the beginning. Technology moves fast. To equip our young people to flourish in a world of change, we therefore strive to give them a foundational understanding of the world that surrounds them, and an intellectual toolbox that equips them to deal with successive waves of technology. For that reason, the new computing curriculum in England, introduced in September 2014, establishes computer science (not just coding, and with computational thinking at its core) as a foundational subject that all children learn, alongside maths and natural science, from primary school onwards.  The previous Information and Communications Technology (ICT) curriculum was focused on, well, technology. The new curriculum is focused on ideas and principles.  As the famous aphorism puts it “computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”.

But if computer science is not about computers, what is it about?  It is the study of information, computation, and communication. Take information, for example: suppose I show you a picture of the French national flag, and one of the Mona Lisa, and ask “which picture contains more information?” What does that even mean? A way to make the question more precise might be “Suppose I dictated instructions to you over the phone; which picture would take longer for you to reproduce?” Clearly the Mona Lisa has more information in this sense: it would be a slow and painstaking job for me to dictate instructions to reproduce it at your end, even rather approximately.  So we have begun to speak of information as a measurable quantity; we start to think about how tightly we could compress data before transmitting it; and how we could detect, and perhaps correct, errors made during transmission.  All this is called information theory; it is part of computer science; it has a substantial body of theory; and it has immediate practical consequences.

What then, is the role of coding or programming (the terms are roughly equivalent) in computer science? Coding is not the message of the new computing curriculum: it is its medium. Coding is the labwork of computer science: it motivates, illuminates, and brings to life the dry bones of theory. Without programming, computer science would be a dry, theoretical husk of a subject.  Imagine a music lesson where the students only studied the rules of counterpoint or the structure of sonata form, but never brought them to life by performing or composing such music!

But that’s not all: programming is more than mere medium. As Fred Brooks put it “The scientist builds in order to study, but the engineer studies in order to build”.   Most of the body of knowledge is organised around the challenge of building ever more ambitious edifices of software, and have them actually work and be useful. Programming is the very stuff of computer science.

Coding is phenomenally creative.  The same Fred Brooks wrote “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.” When a child does a science experiment, she is seeing physical principles at work, coming to life in front of her eyes. But if she does the experiment right, we know what will happen.  In contrast, when she writes a program, no one knows what will happen.  The programmer brings into the world a new creation, formed from an infinitely malleable substance, which does something new, conjured from the mind of its creator.  We are not limited by the strength of wood, or the budget of the school workshop: in programming we are limited only by our own (in) ability to manage the complexity of our creation.

Coding offers immediate, tangible feedback.  No need to wait for the teacher to mark your English essay; in computing, the program runs, or not, and remorselessly exposes the logical errors in your thinking.   When hunting a bug in a malfunctioning program, we form a hypothesis about what is wrong; we formulate tests that will confirm or refute that hypothesis; in the light of the results of those tests we refine the hypothesis, and so on – it is the scientific method in action. Even for students who will never explicitly “program” again, programming teaches understanding and reasoning skills that are needed by everyone: business innovators (identifying the need/potential), scientists (working with data, developing computational models of scientific processes), of those procuring software (eg for the NHS, to know what is possible, what they should be looking for, what is good and what bad) or end users (because one must always have a notional machine model of what a piece of software is doing).

All that – but in addition, of course, programming is a tremendously useful and marketable skill.  In every corner of business, and every part of our daily lives, there are programs, and they all need to be written, modified, fixed, and stitched together. There is tremendous demand for skilled programmers, who command high salaries as a result.

And yet, and yet. There are two risks here.  First, the risk that we confuse the medium with the message.  I fear a future prime minister giving a speech saying “The new computing curriculum has been a great success: every child leaves school fluent in Python”. What a disaster that would be!  The computing curriculum is focused on ideas and principles, not on a particular technology like Python. Yes, some of those ideas (sequence, iteration, choice, abstraction) are directly embodied and brought to life in Python, but Python is just one embodiment among many, not the thing itself. Once pupils have learnt to code in one language they should be able to quickly teach themselves others built on the same concepts, and also recognise those same concepts appearing in the wider world that surrounds them.

The second risk is that we may forget that the school computing curriculum is for the many not the few. I certainly hope that the education our young people receive will inspire some of them to be the software developers of the future. But many more will become lawyers and plumbers, hairdressers and doctors.  They all learn the elementary principles of natural science, and similarly should learn the elementary principles of computer science.  And, just as mathematics appears in primary schools mainly in the guise of arithmetic, so computer science will appear mainly in the form of simple programming. Just as no one confuses arithmetic with the manifold glories of mathematics, so we should not confuse programming with computer science.

Returning to Schleicher’s blog post, he says “The risk is that we will again be teaching students today’s techniques to solve tomorrow’s problems; by the time today’s students graduate, these techniques might already be obsolete. We should instead focus on the computational thinking that underpins these techniques, and that students can use to shape the technologies of tomorrow. ” Fair enough - and indeed computational thinking is already explicitly at the core of the English national curriculum from start to finish.  But teaching programming is emphatically not “teaching today’s techniques to solve tomorrow’s problems”. Programming is computational thinking incarnate, brought to life, made tangible, executable, and useful.  It provides a powerful way to practice and so develop those computational thinking skills, and understand them deeply. People occasionally say “in the future computers will program themselves”, but I believe they are mistaken – we will simply increase the ambition of the programs we write.

So yes, to answer the question, we should teach our children to code. But we should do so not as an end in itself, but rather as a powerful and effective means to motivate, illuminate, and exemplify the underlying principles of computer science.   There is no more intellectually exciting, creative, or practically useful subject. I want to convey to our young people a visceral sense of that richness and creative possibility, and by far the best way to do so is share with them the joy and beauty of programming.