Protecting privacy when sharing student data with the community

*revision 2014* The MOE have contacted me and have since said that it is not ok to publish the NSN number online, even if it is not associated with a name and only shared with parents. To get around this you could use the school student ID number?

After a few conversations at school about the ethics behind sharing student results with parents and other class members +Hamish Arthur came up with an idea that we could hide the student name and use the National Student Number, then unhide the name when we wanted to add data - after about 5 seconds of fiddling with a table in google docs it was clear that this was the way to do it - students and parents can find the boy with the NSN, and the teacher can toggle the hide column - so we wouldn't waste time and easily mismark work when using 9 digit long references instead of names! This is how you do it..

1) Make sure all the students know their NSN number - they should know this if they are level 2, but some level 1 students might need to be told what it is. Easy to find on Kamar or your school admin system - they need to know it anyway and should be encouraged to use it.

2) Export from Kamar a spreadsheet containing the NSN numbers (see this how to guide - and modify at step 3 to insert NSN number from NZQA info)

3) Open your student data table and insert a row to the left of the names, copy and paste the NSN numbers (first checking your student data table has the same name order as the new NSN data)

4) Hide the column with the student names by moving the mouse to the top of column 'b' (or the column where the names were stored) and clicking on the small triangle pointing down - you should have the option to hide the column!

5) This is the table that the parents and students will see when they check the homework, when you want to edit the table you can unhide the name by clicking in the area that looks like the picture below and expanding it.

Make sure you have shared the table as 'view only' or anyone will be able to unhide the column!!

# I tried to use 3 different classes data so that I didn't violate privacy issues in this post about violating privacy!! #

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