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Webcams Watching The Classrooms?
embarcadero writes "Webcams will be tuned to watch over 500 classrooms in the Biloxi, Mississippi school district this year, according to a story in USA Today. The goal is to make classrooms safer, but there's a lot of speculation about how the recorded info could be used for or against teachers in disputes or teaching reviews. I can just see Mrs. Waters pointing towards the camera, 'If I don't catch you cheating on this spelling test, that camera will! Don't even think about it.'"
But privacy advocates, teachers' groups and others worry about putting classes under an all-day microscope. Some say cameras could be misused and interfere with teaching, and others fear that districts using them could become complacent about security.
.02
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching. There are two possible scenarios: a) teachers begin to ignore the cameras and carry on as always or hopefully b) they will realize that the cameras are 100% coverage of their daily teaching and can be used for/against them during review time. They would hopefully improve their teaching and in-class behavior. This could only lead to a better teaching experience IMHO.
How many people have been in class and had a teacher watched by an administration member only to watch a COMPLETELY different teacher come through? Exactly.
I guess districts could possibly become complacent. Do businesses that monitor their cameras become complacent? No, I am pretty sure that they use them effectively for their purpose. I guess ANYTHING is better than a sticker that reads "all visitors must report to the main office."
Just my worthless
...and I ain't talking about CBS!
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
We had cameras on our school buses that recorded to a VCR. Nobody cared, there was still fights on the bus, people would spit or otherwise vandalize the camera. Same thing will happen to these webcams. I will be suprized if they are not stolen and sold on ebay within the first month of classes.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
these are web-enabled with a password. Police can view them "in case of an emergency."
I assume that means that there isn't a general website where people can view the feeds.
I know where this could surley have a benefit (not that I fully understand or agree with the implications of ``in class recording''). At my school, which is in England, a teacher is not allowed to be left alone with a pupil (male or female) for obvious reasons. This has gone to the extent such that certain offices have windows in odd places just to make sure it is easy to ``see in''.
The advantages of having a video camera in situations such as these are obviously very great. There is no longer the requirement for more than one teacher (or pupil) to be present. I know these one-on-one sessions certainly helped with my electronics a couple of years ago before they introduced these new rules. Hopefully they'll be able to benefit future students too!
I have a feeling that everyone's going to be up in arms about privacy but I'm actually ok with this. As long as the teachers are on the clock, their employer owns their time and are within their rights to know what they are doing.
I'm not sure but I believe that schools qualify as public property so the kids aren't being invaded.
I'm all about transparency in stuff that taxpayers pay for and maybe this will actually improve the quality of teaching. No more filmstrips 4 days a week if their bosses can see.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Well, here's one more reason to consider homeschooling my kids. Or at least consider sending them to a private school where such devices can't (or are less likely to be) be eventually required by law.
I already have real reservations about confining my kids for six or more hours a day to a classroom filled only with people their own age, to suffer (mostly) uninspired teaching in regimented fashion, in exchange for dubious literacy. Now I have to worry about them being trained from their earliest years to accept a surveillance society, too.
I can't escape the feeling they could do vastly more productive and useful things with that time on their own. Spider Robinson wrote an excellent piece about this in today's Globe and Mail.
Having taught in difficult situations in the past, I'm all for cameras in the classroom. While a Peace Corps volunteer in 1999-2000 teaching in an agricultural school in Poland (Zespol Szkol Rolniczne w Czernichowie) I was frequently yelled at by the principal for kicking particular students out of class. If only they could have seen the difference the removal of one disruptive student can make in a classroom...
Some may argue that a teacher should be able to handle all students, but with 160 students to keep track of, one can't be both teacher and psychologist to all of them.
I think the presence of cameras will restrain those likely to cause disturbances in class, and will be a tremendous aid in dealing with those who don't belong in a traditional classroom setting. Of course this is from personal experience only. I have no idea what the academic literature says about the idea.
* Not to say that the three kids (from different classes) I frequently kicked out weren't bright - they just made it impossible to get through a lesson with the rest of the students. In some situations pragmatism needs to trump "no child left behind" - if it's a choice between one student not learning a lesson or 20+ not learning...
Why exactly is it nobody is respecting these teens who are the cause and generators of the school funding again?
Because they don't vote. Even the ones old enough to, don't.
Were I a politician I would NEVER worry about pissing off the 18-to-29 demographic because there are simply no consequences (unless the issue has broader traction among older voters).
Wait until the implantable ID chips take off. You'll see the military using it to track their soldiers, prisons using it to find escapees, and parents using it to set off zone alarms if their kid wanders into the front yard.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I know that if my child was in a school with online webcams, I would want to know that there weren't pedophiles or kidnappers looking at my kids in class, that could be a really big security threat!
No, seriously. Forget for a moment about "big brother" fears. This sort of thing would be GREAT for the kids who were beat up for being nerdy (like me), fat, etc. You could just say to the teacher, "If you don't do something about (PERSON X) and (PERSON Y) picking on me, I'll just tell the Principal to review the tapes." Maybe that would help get some results.
A lot of kids (myself included) come away from the public school system with a REALLY negative attitude, since kids are basically allowed to beat the snot out of each other and no one does anything. The resulting perception is that authority figures are cold, ineffectual, and utterly apathetic. This might help alleviate that problem.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Most parents will approve of this for safety reasons. And a previous poster pointed out that the teacher is under some pressure to perform here too.
There are VERY legitimate privacy problems here, but students almost always lose on privacy issues in schools when the subject is brought to court. The paradox here, is that they HAVE to be there, unless their parents can afford to send them to a private school. They have no choice. The state, under force of arms, can force them into the classroom for their own good, the reasoning goes. And yet the facilities and staff are paid for with public dollars. Frankly, you have a better case banning cameras on public streets than you do in schools.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"My word against students'" can't be addressed simply by the administrators trusting the teachers. With the huge amount of lawsuits being filed against teachers I think this will become more and more important. In a lawsuit, your word is likely to be less valuable than the child's (regardless of how right or wrong that is, it's true). If you truly are doing nothing wrong, than cameras can't hurt. So think of it not as the admins not trusting you, but as the admins wanting proof for the courts should you be accused.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
In my high school, about twenty security cameras have gradually been implemented in places where it's likely a student might have something stolen -- outside lockers, in the library, in the parking lots. There are still major hallways uncovered (the kids who make out in the halls probably don't mind being taped, anyway). Tapes are 48 hours long and there isn't much of a retention policy because of storage issues.
But the issue that saves these from being destructive is that the monitor with the digital feed from the cameras is available to any interested student; it's in the office in a highly visible place. If we really didn't like the cameras being there (as, I suspect, these kids may not appreciate having cameras -everywhere-, although that seems an exaggeration), then the students would complain. Students who complain to parents who complain to school board members, or students who complain to student governments (to be honest, those aren't really effective until college) can have a significant impact on public policy.
The broad term for this kind of open access and full disclosure of monitoring is "transparency". Transparency, and the system of taxpayers who encourage accountability, will destroy this system if it is misused and will support it if it helps. Cool.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
That's just the point. School is supposed to prepare young minds to join the society of the future, so they have to be ahead of the game. If they can't learn to say exactly the opposite of what they're thinking, conform, spout the correct dogma at the drop of a hat, and totally withdraw from the outside world due to the effects of paranoia, fear, and suspicion, the educators will not have done their jobs properly.
500 cameras, say at least 10KB/sec per camera, that's 5 MB/sec, 18 GB/hour, at least 8 hours a day, so about 150GB a day. About 200 days in a school year, 30 tera bytes/year.
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Normally I would say "you're in public, suck it up". But what did most honest hard working teachers do to deserve this sort of attention.
From my experience in public schooling teachers by far have no more authority to discipline children for fear of the "avenging mother" syndrome.
If anything the teacher should be able to turn the camera on the students at will to show how "little johny" is actually a little loud mouth mother fucker.
Also whatever happend to just having the principle audit a few classes each semester? My schools did peer reviews where teachers would audit each other and I'd like to think it was positive for them.
We don't need to spend education money "spying" on our teachers. We need to spend it buying text books, library supplies and technology.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
On the contrary, the little hoodlums will continue to blithely doing as they have always done to such as you and I. After all, if they assalted us under the watchful eye of the teacher before, why do you think it should be any different with a camera?
No, it will greatly exacerbate precisely the perception you cite: Big Brother is watching you, and doesn't give a rats ass whether you live or die. If you thought your perception of authority figures was bad, wait for the generation that grew up with their abuse recorded for posterity -- and ignored.
Is a camera going to punish someone? No, merely gather information for a punisher to act upon. But that information is already available; the problem is no one wants to act on it.
A camera is a bluff, and every student knows that. If school staff wanted to know what some kids are doing to other kids, that information is already available to them. But they don't want to have to do anything about it. So they issue vague, idle threats, like "The camera will record you doing it" (so what?), to discourage behavior they don't want to have to intervene in. The punishments will still be a slap on the wrist -- and as often administered to both offender and victim, than just the offender -- and the abuse will continue.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
The same people that design prisons also design a lot of schools.
Kids in school really get the short end of the rights-stick. Remember how your parents always used to tell you that "school is your job?' well, let's look at it from a work-place sort of view:
They are forced to sit at desks. They can have their belongings searched, they have to ask to use the bathroom. They are constantly micromanaged. Imagine if you were subjected to the same things in your workplace. You'd quit in a second.
Adding cameras to schools is not going to solve any problems- teachers will be more stressed out about performing well, kids will have the fear of an eye constantly watching them, and administrators will have one more piece of power over the kids.
I predict major backlash, but it's going to be one of those things that no one picks up on... I am of the opinion that cracking down on kids more and more is what leads to things like Columbine. Kids are people, and they should be treated as such.
Get the kids used to being monitored 24/7 " for their safety"...
Then as adults they will be more accepting to even deeper privacy and rights violations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My kid is in day care, and I've frequently thought that I'd love to be able to log on to a secure site and check up on her from my desk at work.
:)
This sort of thing shouldn't be for the benefits of the police or the administration... it should allow the parents to keep an eye out for their kids. I know if my parents had an idea the kind of crap I soaked up as a kid, I would have had a much easier young life. This being a hang out for geeks, I'm sure lots of you know what I'm talking about
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
They've actually come up with yet another way to degrade and infantilize high school age children. Kids in high school are just a few years from becoming full members of society - driving, voting, military service, etc. Why don't we try treating them as such? Why not reconsider what's wrong with school culture and try to change it to promote better behavior? Naww...just use technology instead!
Put them in right after they install the webcams in the principals office, teachers lounge, and the offices in the superintent of schools offices!!
What, they suddenly dont like the idea? I cant imagine why.....
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...2 recent graduates, and 1 still in HS and 1 in middle school, I say no.
Not only no, but hell no
Fuck no
No goddammed way
over my dead body
The school board and I would rumble over this
Shall I explain myself?
These cameras will do no good
Asshole kids, bent on destruction, will still do it, cameras or no cameras. They do not care. Other kids will be made to feel under suspicion all the time. Teachers will feel pressured. You can't 'force' someone to be a good teacher. Either they are, or fire them. Hey...here's a concept. Pay them a respectable wage.
"Oh, but times have changed! Columbine, drugs, hazing..."
BULLSHIT.
These cams would not stop a Columbine incident. Metal detectors don't, how would cameras?
You know what is needed? Competent teachers and administrators. School district in Mississippi spends 2 million on cameras in the classroom. At $40,000 per, thats 50 teachers. How much good could 50 well paid teachers do? A lot more than some silly cameras, that do not enhance the teaching experience. They can only (possibly) punish the true assholes that do not care. The true assholes will do whatever it is they do with or without cameras.
This concept has so much opportunity for abuse it's not funny. Schools, being quasi-government organizations, will be forced to investigate every little infraction, perceived or real. Instead of letting the teacher and administrators handle things.
What? Incompetent teachers? Crappy principals? Pay them a better wage, and maybe we'll get some competent ones.
The further possibilities of abuse abound. Where are these cameras? In every classroom? OK...no funny stuff going on there. In the bathrooms? In the gym locker rooms? Riiiight. YGBSM. How soon until he cam feed gets hacked?
A bully, bent on hassling some other kid, will simply wait. You gotta go to the bathroom sometime. Or after school.
This will solve nothing
Cameras cannot turn a bad teacher into a good one, nor change the course of an asshole kid. Only human interaction can do that. And cameras are anything but 'human'. Have cameras stopped shoplifting? Not a chance. Have they stopped redlight running? Again, no. Would you feel comfortable under the camera every day, all day, at work? I wouldn't. Then why is it OK to do this to kids?
Give up some freedom, for some perceived security....well...you can see where that goes.
Again...
No
No way
Fuck no
No goddamned way.
Do we really want out kids growing thinking that living life in front of a camera is normal?
-rick
I dated some teachers in the past, so I understand the mindset. But from my standpoint, if the supplies aren't available due to lack of general funding, then that's it. Finito. Fuggetaboutit... Let the kids go home and tell mommie and daddie that they don't have whatever's necessary for them to get an education.
Then if mom and dad actually give a shit, they can buy the stuff for their kid. The other kids can do without, or they can go begging from whereever they want...
Eventually the poorest of the poor will rant and rave and scream and yell and stamp their feet, and taxes will go up so some politico doesn't have to listen to them...
In the meantime, you and your wife can keep the extra cash you'd waste on some unappreciative little shit in the classroom, and go on a well-deserved vacation...
Tell your wife to tally up everything she's spent out of pocket and submit an expense report with receipt copies... If the district doesn't pay - send a copy to the newspapers... That oughta wake up the taxing bodies as to the need for more funding...
As an aside - three cheers to the people who decided to charge for after-school extracurricular activities. I never participated in sports, thought they were a total scam and was pissed that I was forced to spend my money for some jock to play.. Now if they'd just go the extra inch or so and say that the max for a free education is two kids, and charge anyone with more for the total cost of educating each child over two (that way if someone has 6 kids, they get to pay the full costs of the extra 4) - no reason why I ought to...
Even better - I don't have any kids (that I know about), so I should only pay 20% of what someone with kids does...
Oh, the irony...
CSPAN does cover the HoC on occasion. Having seen both the U.S. Congress and the House of Commons on CSPAN, I can definitely say that watching the HoC is infinitely more entertaining than watching my own congress. They're more concise, less constrained by false decorum, and not afraid to call 'bullshit' when needed.
The idea that Mr. Blair has to periodically submit himself to fairly brutal question-and-answer sessions there is something that I wish we could implement in the U.S.