School Kids Get Virtual Web Lockers

Lucas123 writes "Seventh and eighth graders in Tulsa, Oklahoma not only get tablet PCs at the beginning of the school year, but they are now issued 100MB of storage through a hosted school 'Web Locker' system. The Web lockers also include chat, calendaring, and collaboration capabilities, but school administrators can also monitor and track all files uploaded to the system, and lock out individuals for misuse."

Comments

Useless...

[MMC Monster]

Any eight-grader who's worth his salt will have an accessory gmail account to keep the important stuff.

Re:Useless...

[thewiz]

100MB?
Most kids have thumb drives; why would they want to use 100MB of disk space that can be spied on?

Re:Useless...

[myowntrueself]

Funny how those "family values" don't go after violence on TV.

Hey!

Violence is Gods work! Didn't you ever read the old testament??!?!?!?

Incentive?

[arth1]

And what's the incentive for the kids to use this solution, as opposed to the numerous free one provided, which won't have the big brother sees you problem?

Re:Incentive?

[KlaymenDK]

Um, feeling like Ender? That's the only one I can come up with...

Re:Incentive?

[Constantine XVI]

So it comes with an RPG whose sole purpose is to drive you insane?

Re:Incentive?

[SamP2]

Umm, maybe the same one as when in the workplace you are given a corporate email?

This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on /. Nobody is forcing students to use the mail/file system for their own private stuff. But just like in the workplace, where for official business you use corporate resources, in school you are given *for free* school resources to store your notes, homework, projects, or anything else school related.

Some advantages:

- Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
- School bears responsibility for system upkeep - if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project that was stored or submitted there.
- System can be integrated with class notes and announcements, and the calendar can be used as school agenda - student logs in, sees the courses he's taking, and sees the homework assigned to him in each course.
- With login information tied to student IDs, it is much easier to track assignments and work going through the system for administration and teachers, you don't need to wonder who submitted the work coming from email s3xyb4b3@gmail.com.

And YES, you will get in trouble if you download pr0n or pirate music using the system... Just like you would at your workplace for doing the same thing using the corporate system. If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect it to be monitored by your employer.

It's very nice more schools are accepting the high-tech way of doing work. Not only it makes managing assignments much easier (meaning teachers can spend more time TEACHING and less time going through homework), but it trains children to real life, where high-tech work has already became a standard.

Product Placement

[Frosty Piss]

The Web lockers also include chat, calendaring, and collaboration capabilities

And, of course, a steady supply of advertising and "product placement".

That's quite the story write-up, almost as if done by a PR writer...

ComputerWorld Shill

[Anonymous Coward]

In case anyone was wondering, Lucas123 (the submitter) is a ComputerWorld shill. Interesting how many "stories" at Slashdot come from such obvious shills.

How many megabytes?

[Pollux]

In the past, she said, students were only allotted 10MB of server space on the school's network. "We knew this year [students] would be creating movies and doing other things, [so] they needed a lot more space," she said.

School admin here. This quote is just laughable. Granted, up until last year, I had my students set at 100 MB apiece. Looking at the quota log, most students could get along just fine with 25 MB, although those who have more usually just have too many pictures saved up.

But, as soon as we started up doing a multimedia class last year using PhotoShop and Movie Maker, 100 MB was laughable. Some PS projects alone were 60-70 MB, and editing raw video requires ~200 MB per minute of video data. I upped these kids to 300 MB, and when they worked on videos, it was in a separate lab that let students save their data to the hard drives.

I can understand the desire to have portability for students and staff, but that's what thumb drives are for. Besides, there are a number of families who still do not have online access yet.

Re:They will WANT the control

[stonecypher]

These students are being taught to use a system that is ultimately not in their own interests.

Oh for fuck's sake, it's a convenient integrated storage system for student homework to clean the process up for the teachers. This isn't an Orwellian mystery plot. It's not like having this system shuts the students out of other services. The school can't require digital homework delivery if it doesn't provide a baseline so that they know students can fall back on their system if they don't already have something.

Grow up. Not everything is Big Brother.

A digital locker you can't own but must have.

[Erris]

This brings us one step further to losing your right to read. All they need to do is fill it with non free textbooks and tell you not to share them. If there's something everyone needs, you don't need to put it in a locker. A private space for students and computer access would be nice, but not if it's just another tool of control. Requiring the use of non free software is just the first part of that control and it's funny that one of the reasons given was the lack of reliability of the old non free software. The web already offers ways to share calendars, movies and the rest outside the control of the school.

School deploys nfs with quota

[Cajun Hell]

More in-depth reporting on this amazing and lightning-paced story, as it develops!

Wow, somebody got paid for this, as an innovative product. People's tax money was spent on a "technology" for storing files on a remote server. Does anyone else feel a feint impulse to just give up, turn evil, and start fleecing suckers like this? They're out there, and they're waving their money around, jumping up and down, yelling, "Do me! Do meeeeee!!"