ethical & legal issues

Ethical and Legal Issues in Digital Technologies

The concept map illustrates how digital citizenship and teacher ethics intersect to create safe, lawful, and inclusive digital learning environments. Analysis of the readings deepened understanding of how these issues underpin technology-enhanced assessment. Redmond et al. (2018) emphasise that preventing cyberbullying requires explicit structures that build empathy and regulate online interactions. This informed the inclusion of classroom norms and supervised Scratch sessions to ensure students communicate respectfully during collaborative programming. Warnick et al. (2016) extend this by framing teachers as civic exemplars whose online conduct must model professionalism and maintain ethical boundaries. Buchanan (2019) further argues that digital education demands vigilance toward data privacy and transparency to prevent inequity or misuse. These insights led to incorporating a folio component within the summative task so students can document research, testing, and ethical decisions. Together, these perspectives highlight that ethical responsibility is not confined to classroom rules but embedded within the design of learning technologies and assessments. They also underscore the importance of teacher guidance in cultivating critical awareness of digital rights and responsibilities. Collectively, the readings reveal that ethical assessment design must embed both student responsibility and teacher oversight, ensuring technology enhances learning while upholding wellbeing and trust.

References

Buchanan, R. (2019). Digital ethical dilemmas in teaching. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Teacher Education (pp. 1-6). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1179-6_150-1

Redmond, P., Lock, J., & Smart, V. (2018). Pre-service teachers’ perspectives of cyberbullying: A literature-informed framework. Computers & Education, 119, 1–13.

Warnick, B. R., Bitters, T. A., Falk, T. M., & Kim, S. H. (2016). Social media use and teacher ethics: The need for a cultural response. Educational Policy, 30(5), 771–795.