Who We Are
We are TeachThought, LLC., a small, family-owned company operated by founder/director Terrell Heick), a former classroom teacher. We are not a large company by design, as we seek to keep business operating costs low to ensure sustainability in our mission–to innovate education through the growth of innovative teachers.
Heick can be reached through email. Additionally, you can find him on twitter, as well as other social media platforms.
Occasionally, services such as cybersecurity, social media management, graphic design, and more are contracted out by Terry when he lacks the time, tools, or expertise to perform duties necessary to operate TeachThought, LLC.
Privacy Policy
TeachThought, LLC is committed to safeguarding your privacy. Contact us if you have any questions or problems regarding the use of your Personal Data and we will gladly assist you.
By using this site or/and our services, you consent to the Processing of your Personal Data as described in this Privacy Policy.
Preface: We do not sell your information nor collect personal information for any reason other than fulfilling a request by you that requires a response.
Table of Contents
- Definitions used in this Policy
- Data protection principles we follow
- What rights do you have regarding your Personal Data
- What Personal Data we gather about you
- How we use your Personal Data
- Who else has access to your Personal Data
- How we secure your data
- Information about cookies
- Contact information
Definitions
Personal Data – any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.
Processing – any operation or set of operations that is performed on Personal Data or on sets of Personal Data.
Data subject – a natural person whose Personal Data is being Processed.
Child – a natural person under 21 years of age.
We/us (either capitalized or not) –
Data Protection Principles
We promise to follow the following data protection principles:
- Processing is lawful, fair, transparent. Our Processing activities have lawful grounds. We always consider your rights before Processing Personal Data. We will provide you information regarding Processing upon request.
- Processing is limited to the purpose. Our Processing activities fit the purpose for which Personal Data was gathered.
- Processing is done with minimal data. We only gather and Process the minimal amount of Personal Data required for any purpose.
- Processing is limited with a time period. We will not store your personal data for longer than needed.
- We will do our best to ensure the accuracy of data.
- We will do our best to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data.
Data Subject’s rights
The Data Subject has the following rights:
- Right to information – meaning you have to right to know whether your Personal Data is being processed; what data is gathered, from where it is obtained and why and by whom it is processed.
- Right to access – meaning you have the right to access the data collected from/about you. This includes your right to request and obtain a copy of your Personal Data gathered.
- Right to rectification – meaning you have the right to request rectification or erasure of your Personal Data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
- Right to erasure – meaning in certain circumstances you can request for your Personal Data to be erased from our records.
- Right to restrict processing – meaning where certain conditions apply, you have the right to restrict the Processing of your Personal Data.
- Right to object to processing – meaning in certain cases you have the right to object to Processing of your Personal Data, for example in the case of direct marketing.
- Right to object to automated Processing – meaning you have the right to object to automated Processing, including profiling; and not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated Processing. This right you can exercise whenever there is an outcome of the profiling that produces legal effects concerning or significantly affecting you.
- Right to data portability – you have the right to obtain your Personal Data in a machine-readable format or if it is feasible, as a direct transfer from one Processor to another.
- Right to lodge a complaint – in the event that we refuse your request under the Rights of Access, we will provide you with a reason as to why. If you are not satisfied with the way your request has been handled please contact us.
- Right for the help of supervisory authority – meaning you have the right for the help of a supervisory authority and the right for other legal remedies such as claiming damages.
- Right to withdraw consent – you have the right withdraw any given consent for Processing of your Personal Data.
Data we gather
Information you have provided us with
This might be your email address, name, billing address, home address etc.,–mainly information that is necessary for delivering you a product/service or to enhance your customer experience with us. We save the information you provide us with in order for you to comment or perform other activities on the website. This information includes, for example, your name and email address.
Information automatically collected about you
This includes information that is automatically stored by cookies and other session tools. For example, your shopping cart information, your IP address, your shopping history (if there is any) etc. This information is used to improve your customer experience. When you use our services or look at the contents of our website, your activities may be logged.
Information from our partners
We gather information from our trusted partners with confirmation that they have legal grounds to share that information with us. This is either information you have provided them directly with or that they have gathered about you on other legal grounds. See the list of our partners here.
Publicly available information
We might seek information about you that is publicly available–a social media account, for example, when we embed a tweet in a post, perform an internet search to research topics, attributions, the credibility of information/models/frameworks, and more.
- When you use our website, we share information that we may collect from you, such as your email (in hashed form), IP address or information about your browser or operating system, with our partner/service provider, LiveRamp Inc and its group companies (‘LiveRamp’). LiveRamp may use our first party cookie on your browser to match your shared information to their marketing databases in order to provide back a pseudonymous privacy-centric identifier for our use in real time bidding in digital advertising. These third parties may in turn link further demographic or interest-based information to your browser. To opt out of this use, please head here ( https://liveramp.com/opt_out/ ).
Embedded content
Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website–e.g., YouTube, Google Drive, etc.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website. You should seek out the data collection and storage policies of each site to ensure it aligns with your expectations.
Google Privacy pages
We use many Google tools to operate TeachThought, LLC, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Classroom, Google Adsense, Google News, Google Search (internal and external, Google Doubleclick for Publishers, and more.
You can find Google’s policy on privacy of these and other tools here.
Google Analytics Opt-Out
We use Google Analytics to identify traffic patterns and sources, as well as general geographic and demographic data. We never use it to identify individual ‘human beings’ but rather to monitor content trends and anonymized user behavior on the site. You can find a tool to opt-out of Google Analytics here.
Cybersecurity
In the event of cyber-attacks or malicious website usage of any kind, we use technology to identify individual user IPs for the purpose of mitigating/blocking such attacks. We do not use this information to identify individual ‘people’ and/or their contact information unless we are contacting them directly in pursuit of the safety and integrity of our website.
How we use your Personal Data
We use your Personal Data in order to:
- provide our service to you. This includes but is not limited to registering your account; providing you with other products and services that you have requested; providing you with promotional items at your request and communicating with you in relation to those products and services; communicating and interacting with you; and notifying you of changes to any services.
- enhance your customer experience;
- fulfill an obligation under law or contract;
- respond to direct inquiries on social media, through email, via contact forms, and other clearly-used-to-communicate tools (like reader feedback tools)
We use your Personal Data on legitimate grounds and/or with your Consent.
On the grounds of entering into a contract or fulfilling contractual obligations, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:
- to identify you;
- to provide you a service or to send/offer you a product;
- to communicate either for sales or invoicing;
- to communicate for the purposes of operating TeachThought, LLC
- to respond to a direct communication request
On the ground of legitimate interest, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:
- to send you personalized offers* (from us and/or our carefully selected partners);
- to administer and analyze our client base (purchasing behavior and history) in order to improve the quality, variety, and availability of products/ services offered/provided;
- to conduct questionnaires concerning user, reader, and/or client satisfaction;
- to respond to any direct request you might send;
- to research for the purpose of creating content for education professionals;
- to communicate for the purposes of operating TeachThought, LLC
As long as you have not informed us otherwise, we consider offering you products/services that are similar or same as your purchasing history/browsing behavior to be our legitimate interest.
With your consent we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:
- to send you newsletters and campaign offers (from us and/or our carefully selected partners);
- for other purposes we have asked your consent for;
- to communicate for the purposes of operating TeachThought, LLC
We Process your Personal Data in order to fulfill obligations rising from law and/or use your Personal Data for options provided by law. We reserve the right to anonymize Personal Data gathered and to use any such data. We will use data outside the scope of this Policy only when it is anonymized. We save your billing information and other information gathered about you for as long as needed for accounting purposes or other obligations deriving from law, but not longer than five years/60 calendar months.
We might process your Personal Data for additional purposes that are not mentioned here but are compatible with the original purpose for which the data was gathered. To do this, we will ensure that:
- the link between purposes, context, and nature of Personal Data is suitable for further Processing;
- the further Processing would not harm your interests and
- there would be appropriate safeguard for Processing.
We will inform you of any further Processing and purposes.
Who else can access your Personal Data
We do not share your Personal Data with strangers. Personal Data about you is in some cases provided to our trusted partners in order to either make providing the service to you possible or to enhance your customer experience. We share your data with:
Our processing partners
Google Analytics
Our business partners
None
Advertising
This Site is affiliated with Adnimation. You can read more here.
Connected third parties
Contact us for a list of ad networks that collect non-personal/’big data’
We only work with Processing partners who are able to ensure an adequate level of protection to your Personal Data. We disclose your Personal Data to third parties or public officials when we are legally obliged to do so. We might disclose your Personal Data to third parties if you have consented to it or if there are other legal grounds for it.
How we secure your data
We do our best to keep your Personal Data safe.
1. We rarely collect non-anonymous information that could be used to ‘identify’ you, and when we do we are very clear about what we’re collecting and why
2. We do not directly ‘store’ any personal information about individual users on any /server’ or other database operated directly by TeachThought, LLC.
3. The most frequent data we collect is used to communicate directly with you or send a newsletter you requested, confirmed the request, and otherwise directly signed up for.
4. We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as https).
5. TeachThought contracts expertise in cybersecurity that regularly reviews our safety protocol, identifies vulnerabilities, and makes any necessary changes/improvements to reduce threats to your data, our data as a company, and our shared experience as education professionals trying to work together in a sometimes dangerous social/digital/internet context. This security expertise responds to any malware attacks and/or data breaches, works closely with our Director Terry Heick to identify threats/compromises, and reinforces practices and tools/technology to reduce the chance of future attacks.
6. We use anonymizing and pseudonymizing where suitable.
7. We monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks through both automated and non-automated means.
8. We use the very latest and most credible firewall and cybersecurity technology to protect everything related to TeachThought–including your data.
Even though we try our best, no company can guarantee the security of information. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur.
If you have an account with us, note that you have to keep your username and password secret.
Commenting
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.
After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Children
TeachThought is made for adult users 18+. We do not intend to collect or knowingly collect information from children. We do not target children with our services nor allow children to register for or use the services provided with our website or company.
Cookies and other technologies we use
We use cookies and/or similar technologies to analyze customer behavior, administer the website, track users’ movements, and to collect information about users. This is done in order to personalize and enhance your experience with us.
A cookie is a tiny text file stored on your computer. Cookies store information that is used to help make sites work. Only we can access the cookies created by our website. You can control your cookies at the browser level. Choosing to disable cookies may hinder your use of certain functions.
If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to save your name, email address, and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. Left unadjusted by you, these cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select ‘Remember Me,’ your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
We use cookies for the following purposes:
- Necessary cookies – these cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website, such as logging in. These cookies don’t collect any personal information.
- Functionality cookies – these cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalized features possible. For example, they might remember your name and email in comment forms so you don’t have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.
- Analytics cookies – these cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services
- Advertising cookies – these cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are relevant to you and to your interests. In addition, they are used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement. They are usually placed ‘on’ the website by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.
You can remove cookies stored in/’on’ your computer via your browser settings. Alternatively, you can control some 3rd-party cookies by using a privacy enhancement platform such as optout.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.com. For more information about cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org.
We use Google Analytics to measure traffic on our website. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt-out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.
Uploading Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact Forms
If you submit information through a contact form, we will use that information to respond to you.
Contact Information
Representative Contact for the EU: Terry Heick [email protected]
Supervisory Authority
Website: https://www.dataprotection.ie/
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +353 57 868 4800
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy
Last modification was made January 2024.