Keeping kids safe on Zoom

[LetMyPeopleCode]

Let's lay out best practices for enabling our mentors to provide personal help while maintaining the safety of the kids.

Here's the RaspberryPi Foundation's safeguarding policy.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2020/05/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation_Safeguarding_Policy_May_2020.pdf

Take the RaspberryPi Foundation's safeguarding course.
https://raspberrypifoundation.learnupon.com/users/sign_up

Let's use this discussion to add any other things we think we should do and develop Zoom-specific response plans (eg: "situation > Actions") so we have some established methods in place before we open up to families.

[garyhtou]

Here are my thoughts:

General Safety

• Adopt a code of conduct (not sure if Seattle Coder Dojo already has one).
• Have an easy way to report violations/concerns (form on a website or generic email address)

Zoom

• Make sure the waiting room feature is on. This will help prevent zoom calls from getting "bombed".
• Verify people in the waiting room against a list of registered students (difficult to do if their zoom names aren't the same as the one on their registration)
• Mute participants on entry (This is a setting within your zoom settings).
• If you use breakout rooms, have multiple people within each room (no one-on-ones).
• Assign co-hosts. This way multiple people are able to respond when necessary (kick/mute participants).
• Limit who can screen share. This may make it difficult for mentors to help debug code. Maybe encourage the use of online real-time collaboration tools such as repl.it multiplayer.
• If all goes wrong, end the zoom call and send out a new link.

[Merlin04]

Verify people in the waiting room against a list of registered students (difficult to do if their zoom names aren't the same as the one on their registration)

We could use Microsoft Teams, it could make that a lot easier. We could have a field on a registration form for a Microsoft account email, and invite those emails to a team (or a specific channel in the team for the week's meeting). There's a lot of other management features we could use as well. I used Teams for both online school and another online summer program and it worked great.

[LetMyPeopleCode]

Checking into Teams. Seems they have channels instead of breakout rooms, so we'd have to see what admin tools we'd have to regulate that and how many user subs we'd have to buy to get some of the more advanced admin.

[LetMyPeopleCode]

@garytou2 we have a CoC in our T&C that people agree to when they "buy" tickets, but it may need updating for online.
We can ask people to provide their Zoom names as part of the event registration process, then send the link only to registrants to help ensure they provided a valid email at registration.

Noodling on the other ideas. Thanks for the response.