Media literacy through collaborative production

TMS Privacy and Online Safety Policy

Privacy Policy Contents

Overview

We take privacy and online safety seriously at The Media Spot ("TMS"). One of the most important outcomes of the services we provide is the opportunity to inform students about Internet safety, and get them into safe online habits in a proctored environment.

We encourage participation and sharing, but are careful to protect the identities of everyone involved with TMS. We do not allow the full names of students to appear on our web site or any production materials, and we will always collect parental consent forms before students can participate in recorded productions.

We comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act issued by the Federal Trade Commission to place parents in control over information collected from their children online.

TMS works with four groups of people:

  1. "educators": classroom teachers, camp counselors, and other adults supervising youth
  2. "students": classroom students, campers, and other youth
  3. "parents": parents or legal guardians
  4. "media professionals": professional media producers, media educators, and media academics

Together, these groups are referred to as the program "participants". TMS will never collect information about program participants other than via normal discussion limited to the learning environment, and via registration on the TMS web site. Participant information is collected for internal use only and will never be shared with third parties, except by prior consent (such as for communication and collaboration with other learning environments).

Students may not participate directly in any recorded TMS production without a TMS consent form.

Please contact us if have any questions about this policy.

Types of Information Collected by TMS

During the course of production in the classroom, student information may be collected and used as it would otherwise by the educator in the learning environment.

Program participants will be encouraged to register on the TMS web site to build a media literacy community. Those participants who choose to register ("registrants") will need to provide a certain set of information such as a username, password, and email address. Students will not be allowed to use their last names during registration, and will be discouraged from using any personally-identifying information during registration or their usage of the TMS web site. Email addresses provided during registration will never be made publicly-available.

TMS will make all good faith efforts to keep registrant information secure and private.

The TMS web site uses cookies for the convenience of web site visitors, and for aggregating non-personally-identifying statistics. Site visitors who do not wish to have cookies stored on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies from the TMS web site, though this will make certain web site features unavailable.

How TMS Uses/Discloses This Information

Personally-identifying information collected in the learning environment during the course of the program will never be retained formally by TMS or posted to the TMS web site.

TMS will never disclose any information collected to any commercial third parties.

With explicit prior consent, participant information may be shared with other educators for the purposes of collaboration, media education community-building, or program reference. In the case of students, no personally-identifying information will be shared.

Registrants on the TMS web site may occasionally be sent email messages regarding TMS news and updates, from which they can opt-out at any time.

Parental rights

Parents are a vital part of media education and we encourage parental participation in every aspect of the program, including registration on the TMS web site.

TMS requires a parental consent form before a student participates in any recorded TMS production.

Please contact us directly with any questions.

We require a media release and consent form to be signed by a parent or guardian before a student can participate in any TMS production. This form is a signed agreement that allows the student to appear in projects produced in this program, and allows those projects to be displayed on themediaspot.org, for non-profit purposes and in accordance with this privacy policy.

Additional release and consent forms may be supplied by participating educational organizations.

Current media release and consent forms: