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What Restrictions Should Student Laptops Have?
An anonymous reader writes "We're a school district in the beginning phases of a laptop program which has the eventual goal of putting a Macbook in the hands of every student from 6th to 12th grade. The students will essentially own the computers, are expected to take them home every night, and will be able to purchase the laptops for a nominal fee upon graduation.
Here's the dilemma — how much freedom do you give to students? The state mandates web filtering on all machines. However, there is some flexibility on exactly what should be filtered. Are things like Facebook and Myspace a legitimate use of a school computer? What about games, forums, or blogs, all of which could be educational, distracting or obscene? We also have the ability to monitor any machine remotely, lock the machine down at certain hours, prevent the installation of any software by the user, and prevent the use of iChat. How far do we take this?
While on one hand we need to avoid legal problems and irresponsible behavior, there's a danger of going so far to minimize liability that we make the tool nearly useless. Equally concerning is the message sent to the students. Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?"
See title. Have you been in a high school where students have access to computers that have such filtering? They get around it really quickly, and such information spreads like wildfire. And the fun thing with laptops is, you'll never know since they'll only do it at home.
Filtering just won't work. Trust the students a little. You can't expect them to just use the laptops for schoolwork... it's just unrealistic, and it's unnecessary.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
(I apologize for responding to my own comment, but this whole monitoring thing really gets to me.)
I can see how you'd want to make sure to block bad content for the kids, especially to maybe protect you from lawsuits of some kind (IANAL), but you can have filters and whatnot set up without this remote monitoring stuff.
But lets say that the kids didn't mind people seeing what they did on these machines; how do you think the parents would feel about someone being able to spy on their kid that extensively? I really don't see that going over well at all...
"Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!"
-Londo Mollari
Unless you're trying to teach them to circumvent computer security you give them a laptop with no restrictions whatsoever.
- If you put ANY restrictions on it, they will immediately start trying to break them. You'll be giving them an early start on a life of cybercrime.
- And if you punish them (the ones that get caught) for doing it, you'll also be giving them an early start on a criminal record.
Here's what I'd do in your place:
- Include a standard load on each laptop.
- Provide a backup facility on the school's network for those files they want to back up.
- Have the standard load preconfigured to automatically back up a particular subfolder. Tell them to store their schoolwork (and anything else they want preserved) there until they learn how to configure it to back up additional folders.
- Provide a facility for reloading the laptop with the standard load and restoring the backed up folder(s). No penalty for the kid to reload it to stock, even repeatedly.
- Explicitly grant permission for the kids to experiment with their laptops, loading what they want, trying other op systems, etc. (Warn them about only loading stuff they have rights to: Purchased software, FOSS software, their own stuff, stuff they have the author's permission to load, etc.)
- Let them try to run with alternate OSes, dual-booted, etc. (Warn them that the school personnel probably can't help them much with other configurations, but if they help each other or find help on the web that's fine.) Let them access the backup tools from alternate OSes if they can figure out how.
- Do any government-mandated censorship on the school's network, not on the kids' laptops.
Then the kids can reconfigure their laptops all they want and experiment all they want. When (not if) they break the configuration they can go to the school's lab and restore it to a known starting point with the latest backup of their important files
THIS way, instead of starting them on a life of cybercrime, you'll start them on a life of computer literacy and skill. You'll quickly find yourself with a herd of little geniuses, with some of them running a computing club and most of them - even those whose primary interests are something other than computers - displaying exceptional computer literacy.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's a great way to prepare them for the real world, isn't it, where corporate computers are locked down pretty hard. I think a better idea would be to survey some companies (larger ones with as many or more employees as there are students) in the local area and average out their practices.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Not much else to say on the subject. If you're using my taxes to purchase those laptops, you don't get to decide what content they can access.
My step-son just graduated from an "all laptop" high school. His father was paying and making decisions; if it were up to me, he wouldn't have lasted a semester before I pulled him.
They gave all the kids Thinkpads (OK, sold them Thinkpads - private school) and then left them unlocked. The step-son and all his friends installed every pirated game you can imagine and sat around in class all day playing. Not a lot of education happening as far as I could tell.
So my advice is this: Lock them down. Forget about "essentially own the computers;" if the laptop is school property, the laptop is school property.
Give them basic office apps, and whatever educational software they need. Don't let them install anything. Unless there's an educational need for it, no iChat. Sounds like a good way to cheat on tests to me.
If I weren't in IT at work, that's what my work laptop would be like. Because I'm in IT, I can get administrator rights, but pretty much nobody else can. Why should school be different?
It isn't your responsibility to provide a fun-time laptop; you don't care if they use it for anything except school work. The laptop is a piece of school property to be used for educational purposes, just like a textbook, or a desk, or a photocopier. It's a tool, not a toy, and once you realize that you'll feel better about the whole thing.
Would you say that students should be allowed unlimited access to the photocopier for personal purposes? Of course not. Same thing.
The network filtering is tougher, but again, I come back to "what's work like?" I have to go to some technical web sites at home that I legitimately need access to, because Websense won't let me get to them. It also won't let me get to porn, gambling (including the state lottery site) hacking or proxy avoidance information.
The same should apply to school - in spades. Maybe you should just have a white list based on lesson plans rather than trying to filter out the garbage.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I have a 5 year old Toughbook that regularly get's tossed 20 feet into the bed of a pickup truck. sometimes I miss and hit the pavement on the other side of the truck.
It's great, freaks out contractors all the time.
"Wow cool laptop!"
yup, it's expensive, about 3 grand.
"wow!"
gotta go, hey watch this. Throw it at the wall, dump my coffee in the keyboard.
"holy crap!!! what are you doing????"
Trying to get the boss to buy me a new one...
Mine looks like it has spent 3 tours of duty in iraq. I get really wierd looks at starbucks with it sitting there with road rash and a dent in the corner.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The law of freedom of speech applies to the people providing it; not necessarily accessing it.
SCOTUS rulings say otherwise, specifically school systems cannot censor libraries for non obscene materials.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
That's a great way to prepare them for the real world, isn't it, where corporate computers are locked down pretty hard.
In my career (since 1982), there have only been two places I've worked where the computers were "locked down", and these restrictions were trivially bypassed. There were policies in effect at these companies, including one where you supposedly had to apply to your manager for permission to access each indivdual web site. In practice, it took about two or three days before any new employee or contractor was told the IP number of the unrestricted proxy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Anyway... the (clever) kids will bypass the filtering and remote management within a few hours/days of getting the machines, so the point is more or less moot.
That is my objection to this.
Locking things down is futile without punishment for kids who work around it. Given the incentives, the punishment will have to be heavy to be effective.
By giving them their own laptops to take home, you are giving them a very strong temptation to break the rules. All the more so because they are now less likely to have their own PCs - an issue that does not apply to adults taking an employer's laptop home.
Another difference is that you are saying that they will "essentially own" the laptops. This is likely to make them feel that they have the right to do what they want with them.
It would be far better to do what employers do and say: this is our laptop, use it for what we say: if you want to do anything else, buy your own. I am assuming that letting them actually treat them as if them own them is not an option.
While I agree that the question of restrictions needs to be thought out, I also think that the whole "they will be able to buy it when they graduate for a nominal fee" is retarded, as in "Ain't gonna happen." Would you want to buy a 6-year-old computer that's been dragged back and forth between home and school on a daily basis, and is probably obsolete as all hell?
Also, why not just spring for cheaper linux laptops, and just give them for free at the end of the 6 years? You'll save more up-front than you'd ever get on the back end with a "nominal fee", you won't have to pay for an OS update at the 3-year point, and you can upgrade the hard drive, ram, and wireless card easily and cheaply.
Heck, buy Windows laptops and then ask for a rebate on each unused copy of the OS.
We had an understanding. We didn't steal or break any computers at the school, and we could do whatever we wanted with the laptops.
But it was OS 9 so that wasn't much. I really find it hard to believe /anyone/ used macs before OS X.
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Punishment? No! The filters should be there to encourage the kids to learn how to bypass them, in the process they will learn alot, and be highly motivated to learn alot.
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/1996-01-23/ On the other hand, if you enable internet filters to things like facebook you will very quickly expose your kids to the world of hacking, ssh tunnels and external proxies!