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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?"
don't be a nazi.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
No offense or anything, but I wouldn't touch one of those with a 10 foot pole with those restrictions, especially with the "monitor any machine remotely" part.
"Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!"
-Londo Mollari
You can't put too many restrictions on them, or else they'll ditch the school-provided laptops for something else.
They should not be allowed to use them during the time that they are supposed to be learning.
What are kids going to to do when they break these things taking them home very night? I wouldn't want my kid carrying around one of the schools computers every day.
How about ....n o n e...?
Given that most students will need little time to work around any restrictions in their way. Use the program as a way to demonstrate trust.
Why on earth are you choosing macbooks, aren't there better options for your school? Off the top of my head, the asus eee 900 line would be great, the 900A or 901 would both be great and can be loaded with linux easily, or leave the xandros that comes with it on and it'll work fine. I doubt the students will have the know how to hack linux.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Leopard has this capability built in.
Parental Controls
Surely blocking porn is enough? Blocking anything else is a cat and mouse game. You can be sure that they will figure out how to defeat the filtering anyways.
Judging from practically every computer with a body in front of it at my local community college, these are the only 2 reasons to even have a computer.
If you express your goals as "Academic" then restrictions are seen in a different light.
In the scenario you described, "they practically own" the computer yet there need to be so many restrictions for the School to be happy, you have a conflict. You can't have it both ways.
Web filtering is a yes, in my opinion. Any legitimate website with real content does not need to be grouped with trashy websites. Meaning if you block all friendster's you aren't actually blocking anything that's "A useful must have" because if it were it wouldn't be grouped with myspace (which everyone basically views as a portal to idleness).
Block certain protocols as well, p2p, etc. This gives you deniability ("We didn't give students the ability to pirate software/media, they achieved that by bypassing our reasonable protections).
In a nutshell you need to iron out the goal of these computers. They can't be both personal and school only computers at the same time.
That's my opinion.
Why are students each getting a laptop? What's the goal? Is it to have a single environment with a single set of software that students can all work on commonly to assure instruction can make use of computers effectively? Is it simply to ensure students have computer literacy and/or access to computers for those who do not? How are you going to use these laptops day to day that is unique to what can be done from a home computer or library computer or computer cluster? These are the questions you have to ask before determining how much you want to limit student use. My initial inclination is that limiting the ability to mess with these computers is a huge mistake. It makes students less likely to learn about the machines they're using and less likely to use these machines. It makes these computers a hassle and something used solely for class assignments that cannot be done any other way and a paper weight the rest of the time. The only limitations should be use of anti-virus software and other protections so that they cannot hurt the network at the school when attached to it. Blocking ports for instant messaging services and internet filtering while in school is appropriate to ensure the integrity of the network, but crippling the computers is not necessary or advantageous. Are students really going to be expected to use a single machine bought in 6th grade through 12th grade? Are you going to be able to remove these restrictions, and be willing to go through the work to do so, when students buy their computers out right when they graduate? That could be a ton of work. Protect the network, block stuff from coming in that can affect other machines, but don't cripple the computers themselves. You'll only assure their limited use/usefulness. But honestly, before spending all that money, there need to be some good answers as to why your curriculum has unique needs that require each student have a laptop.
I think there are several schools of thought on this issue. Do you give the students maximum freedom and test their desire to be educated? Or do you take a more totalitarian approach and "force" the laptops to be used as learning tools?
I don't have any experience in school administration, even at an IT support level. However, understand that not every kid that goes to school goes with the intention to learn. With that being the case, expect that there will be students that will use the computer for their own personal leisure and students that will really use them as they were intended to be used.
Being that I believe that the desire for students to truly learn and excel rest with them, I would probably be really lax about the restrictions on the computer. Really determined slackers will find ways to bypass soft restrictions anyway, which is an extra step that your department will have to prepare for. That is, of course, if you decide to distribute a shiny new Macbook to every new student.
Is there any way that you can distribute computers based on academic performance? It might seem like bribery in a sense, but in this case it just might make sense. Better performing students would obviously make good use of having a laptop and being more productive, so why not save money and let them enjoy the prize?
The geeks in the classes will make a killing doing clean installs for those who can't figure out how to do it themselves. It will also install a very healthy antipathy for authority, what isn't already created by the school officials' other, similarly misguided, actions.
You're really asking the wrong people about this. Most of the replies you're going to get on Slashdot will be no restrictions because I wouldn't want restrictions on my machine. This is true for adults but you're dealing with children, some as young as 11 years old.
The people you really should be talking to are the parents in your district. Ultimately what their children see and how they interact with the world is up to the parents. I imagine that you will probably have a number of views that you will have to synthesize. Perhaps even create a number of different user profiles and allow parents to choose which one their child will fit into. But the first stop is ask the parents. As an upside, some of the parents will have grappled with many of the same problems at work and will probably have some insights.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
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 worked in a school district in British Columbia, Canada long ago. They were the second (?) district in BC to institute this same idea. In the end it was successful. You can find them at http://www.nisgaa.bc.ca/ (note the kids with macbooks on the main page). I'm sure they have a plethora of info on the do's and don'ts on the subject. Sorry Nisga'a school district for all the traffic I could be sending you ;)
There should only be restrictions while the users are at school. There shouldn't be any restrictions outside of school—it's in loco parentis, not semper parentis.
As such, any filtering should be left on your network connection. If you want to block the ports iChat uses at school, go ahead. If you want to filter the web, go ahead. But there's no reason they shouldn't be able to use them at home.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Since when do grade 6 students get laptops at school? And what happens when students "lose" the laptops? And what student is possibly going to buy a 6 year old laptop when they graduate? If someone offered to sell you a laptop from 2002 right now, how much do you think you'd pay? So many questions.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
The students will essentially own the computers, are expected to take them home every night
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
These two statements are contradictory. The sooner you accept this the less expensive the lesson will be for all involved.
Have a background proccess block certain activities based on the time of day. I know this could lead to the kids trying to move the clock forward but you could probably set it to sync with the ntp equivelent or password protect the clock process. Then send home a sheet alerting the parents to the restrictions and give them the option to unlock the laptop. Therefore your not legally responsible for any activities that may or may not happen on temporary school property. Of course I've never used OSX before so I'm not how you'd implement this. But I believe this would be a way to avoid any conflicts.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
...about 300 kids K-12. I'm a little surprised that you're asking this question. Are you a technology coordinator who is now addressing these concerns for a district who has never addressed them until now?
Most districts have access restriction policies that students have to agree to and sign. I'm sure about 95% of the Slashdot crowd's gonna scream to high heaven against restrictions, but it's a no-brainer. In short, four letters: CIPA. From the FCC's webpage:
Schools and libraries subject to CIPA are required to adopt and implement a policy addressing: (a) access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet; (b) the safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications; (c) unauthorized access, including so-called "hacking," and other unlawful activities by minors online; (d) unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors; and (e) restricting minors' access to materials harmful to them.
These last two are really the biggest ones to consider when drafting an Acceptable Use policy, particularly the last, since "materials harmful to them" could mean practically anything.
Our district has taken steps to block MySpace, FaceBook, etc., because all these websites allow minors to publish themselves online. If students accessed these sites at school, and the child was kidnapped due to information posted on MySpace, districts may be found liable.
And banning MySpace will certainly not make these laptops useless. I'm surprised by this comment...it sounds quite ignorant. Districts didn't spend millions of dollars on these machines for students to post poorly-made self-portraits of themselves online. They (I hope) spent the money to grant students equal access to a tool that can be used to enhance learning. I would see a school-owned laptop in the hands of a student exactly the same way as any other computer at school. I'd restrict the hell out of it, because until they graduate and buy it for themselves, the district is responsible for what is done with that laptop.
You don't stand a chance. The kids have physical access and you need to be able to run mainstream software. That means any knowledgeable kid can get administrative access in a heartbeat . Then 11+ year olds will tell each other how. You are done. As for remote monitor, they are on their home routers. They phone / cable company firewall is not going going to accept a TCP/IP connection you establish which means you can't do it.
The first thing you need to do is get realistic expectations or start constructed a much more secure system, which is not going to be a macbook you are talking encrypted drives, TPM chips, access keys on some pager which need to be plugged in for the system to work.... trusted computing group website.
Schools aren't going to pay for that sort of stuff. What you do is you set expectations reasonably, lock the system down badly, filter the minimum and have an easy way to re-image and that's it.
(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
Sorry, but the answer to this one is really easy. There's no evidence that giving laptops out to K-12 students has any positive effect on education whatsoever. Since their educational effectiveness is zero, the educational impact of any of these decisions that you make will also be zero. If you want to make absolutely sure you don't get sued by parents who are upset about how their kids were damaged for life by seeing porn, uncable all the hard disks before you hand out the computers.
Find free books.
My mom recently caught my kid sister (age 12) visiting some "inappropriate sites", and immediately went off the deep end, asking about filtering, auditing, locking the system down, the works. So we talked about it, and I let it sit for a few days, then invited my friend over and we had a "big sister" chat. And then I showed her how to delete entries from her browsing history.
Let me tell you right now -- there's no way to lock a system down. There's no way to filter, audit, etc., to a kid. Besides, kids are bored most of the time anyway and all you're giving them is a challenge. So the way I see it, you've got two options -- either you act as the gatekeeper, or you act as the guide. You can't be both.
The gatekeeper is the filters, the auditing, the monitoring -- in short, the parent. Is this a role you want to play as school administrators? Are you prepared for the legal responsibility? I know you're going to be catching flack from people like my mom who are going to throw a knipshit the moment their precious snowflake gets busted reading harry potter slashfic, or realize that google image search for hentai or eucci brings up cartoon-depicted sex acts. They'll be at your school board meetings, on your voice mail, and holding the ears of everyone they can get a hold of. Visualize that for a minute. The state of the art in filtering and monitoring cannot and never will fully succeed in its stated goals, if only because it's a shifting target and defining "appropriate for minors" is about as useful an excercise as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Your second role is equally perilous. You be the guide -- which means educating those students. This is the computer equivalent of sex ed classes. You need to tell them what's online (and I mean what's really out there), what the risks are, and how they can protect themselves. You need to instill in them the ability to make moral and ethical decisions about their conduct online, with the explicit understanding that you can't stop them from going where they shouldn't -- only that they know what the consequences are (or could be). And here again, the parents are going to throw a knipshit and want your head over religious matters, etc., and flying spaghetti monster we go.
My advice is to offer some limited education to the students about what's out there, how to stay safe, and offer filtering and monitoring software for the parents to use. Ultimately you need to get the responsibility for how the students use these systems off your shoulders, or you will find yourself in a very special kind of hell that will do neither your school district nor your career any good. The key words here is "informed consent." You make a good faith effort to educate, cover your ass with disclaimers, and leave the final decision to the parents. Do not give these people any way to wiggle out of responsibility for their darling little crotch-fruit. It's blunt, but there it is -- you have to look out for yourself here first.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I would put such a laptop in the trash, or just reformat it.
Don't try to limit what they can do with it, because they can do whatever they want with it. You have no control at all.
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
..only partially
40% of the replies will be "do not filter anything, you Nazi!"
1/2 of those will be "Do everything in your power to circumvent the existing school board rules."
Another 30% will say "don't bother, because the kids will just go around your blockages."(thinking that all school kids are as adept as the ubergeeks here are)
You may get a very few replies about how you can actually do what your job requires.
>>Are things like Facebook and Myspace a legitimate use of a school computer?
Well, I didn't think they were a legitimate thing for a business computer... but now our company is on a "social networking" rampage. We're actually being encouraged to use them, but nobody seems to be able to quantify the business benefit yet, other than "get networking!". Yay.
And yes, I work for a Fortune-500 company (actually, a pretty stuffy historical brand name)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
This is a terrible waste of money. Students do not need a computer to learn.
Is it "protecting kids from themselves"? Besides the fact of whether you want to do this or not, many kids will have access to their parents' or friends laptops anyway. Are you trying to cover your ass if they do something dumb? Just trust the damn students. Put the responsibility on them: if they accept the laptop, they accept that they have to decide what is "good, moral, proper" etc. to do on the laptop, with all the consequences of it. If you start policing, you're basically implicitly assuming responsibility for the kids, not allowing them to take responsibility, or for the parents to teach them responsibility. When you do screw up and let the kids download child porn, it'll be all on your head.
I think you're confusing "laptop" with "girl".
Learning does not require a computer.
There's just no way to appreciate them properly on those tiny laptop LCD screens.
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.
Why is everyone so convinced that giving students laptops will act as an educational magic bullet? Locking them down will only cause the students to try and work around the restrictions. Whats to prevent them from using a live Linux CD to browse the web as they please?
Laptops wont do shit to improve learning by any means. Teachers along with parents are the most important part in a child's education. And students today from what I have observed really don't value education. And that started at home. Too many students in one class who don't value education causes the teacher to literally give up. I grew up in a house where both my parents hold masters degrees. My mother and father always took me and my brother on educational family outings. Queens hall of science, Libery science center, Edison meuseam, Zoos, other museums etc. I was never a good student but my mother helped me through allot of my problems and made sure I got through school. My father ran the family business which was a machine shop, wood shop and also did entertainment. He would take me to machinery trade shows and all kinds of interesting places. He also let me play at his shop and imposed no real restrictions. He let me be as creative as possible even teaching me how to use some real dangerous machines like band saws, lathes, milling machines, bench grinders and table saws.
Bottom line is my parents created an environment that encouraged education and learning. They knew its value and made sure both me and my brother will be successful in life (This is a big part of Jewish culture, and no I am not Jewish). No computer will ever provide that. If you want to give them computers make them available for students to use in school computer labs or library's. They can do all the research they need and you wont have to worry about laptops being stolen, destroyed or hacked. Giving kids laptops will only distract them more. There is no magic bullet, if the parents don't give a shit then neither will the kids. And it seems to be a growing epidemic.
That you leave root access on, or at least install the developer tools.
What the real tragedy is, is that when school's lock machine's down, they usually do it in a way that prevents the main goal of giving the kids access to computers in the first place: learning.
If the machine doesn't come with apple's developer tools, and the kids don't have root access so they can install additional *unix* software to /usr/bin, you have already totally failed in giving them the computer. Yet, this is usually the sort of things school's do.
What's the point of giving kids computers if they can't learn about them by tinkering with them?
As far as the protections you are talking about, I have to agree with everyone else when I say they are insanely draconian and kind of pointless.
No matter what you do, I can guarantee you within a month every kid is going to know how to get around them to look at porn on those things, and realistically that's the main thing parents would like to stop. I mean, do you really think that thousands of high school kids are going to be too dumb to figure out how to use a proxy? That not one guy is going to figure this out and tell everyone else? How dumb are your kids exactly?
This is part of the reason why public schooling in the united states is so utterly worthless. It's not because american kids are magically just dumber than kids in other countries, and it's not for lack of funding. The culture of the "educators" is the problem. I'm 24 now and have graduated from both high school and college, but I still remember high school well, and it's the patronizing and incompetent teachers that made it so worthless of a learning experience.
If you start off assuming that your kids are too dumb to learn anything, to want to play with technology, the be able to get around the trivial restrictions you are talking about, then how do you expect to ever teach them *anything*? You won't, and so far testing indicates you *haven't*.
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.
Don't be ridiculous. When one person breaks the law, that person is wrong. When everybody breaks a law, the law is wrong.
Having a rule that you know many, many people will break (and get away with?) is a good way to make those people lose respect for any other (more important?) rules you have.
My oldest had a school laptop for two years, and my middle daughter is on her second year with hers.
The middle schools provides them with low end macbooks. If you pay a $50 fee for the year to cover "insurance" the kids can bring them home, otherwise they stay at school. These have the same kinds of potential restrictions you mention.
They can be put onto home wireless networks, and can print to home machines. The kids do not have the ability to add software, and are prohibited by their signed agreement from doing all the things you'd expect middle school kids to try doing. Mostly, they don't -- or they do it carefully enough not to get caught. That is a valuable skill set itself, and the kids become comfortable with the machines.
More important -- the kids work with these machines in a fairly realistic way. They use Garage Band as part of their music class. They use keynote to do oral reports, and they use the word processor to prepare their reports -- and are expected to produce quality work with them.
The point is, the machines are well integrated into the teaching plan. If not, they're a distraction.
When my oldest moved on to high school, I wanted to get her a laptop of her own. She'd had a PC in her room for years, and had the school laptop from middle school before that -- A mac. I asked her what she liked better, a Mac or a PC. She just looked at me, and asked why she should care. To her, they're just tools. They both work, and she just didn't care much. Since I could get a pretty good PC laptop for about 300 dollars cheaper than a cheap Mac laptop, I offered to split the difference with her from her savings if she wanted the Mac. She thought that was a stupid waste of money.
My point is there, is that by 15 she's comfortable enough with the technology to be unimpressed by it, and to see it as just another tool. As to p0rn surfing? At school its reasonably blocked (I can get by, she can't) and at home she's on my network. She knows I have firewall logs, and reserve the right to forensically review her machine. I don't though. I really really really don't want to know her taste in p0rn -- and even my 9 year old knows better than to give out personal information on-line.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I taught in a laptop school several years ago. The technology was JUST maturing then, but most of my problems were person-driven rather than technology-driven.
Here are my tips
1) Firmly establish who actually owns what, because that determines the scope of your reach. If the computers are still school property, you have a lot more reach than if the kids buy them up front or buy on an installment plan.
2) Either way, you're going to have to amend your Acceptable Use Policy to address issues brought up by the laptops. I would do some research into other laptop schools and download their AUP. In fact, contacting other laptop schools is probably a good idea in general. It's always better to make your first mistakes vicariously through someone else.
3) Partition the laptops so that user data is stored on a separate partition, and invest in a good disk-imaging system. You're going to be imaging a lot of laptops after a few weeks. No matter how hard you lock them down, someone is going to screw something up so royally that you can spend 6 hours fixing it or 10 minutes imaging the disk, and it will happen frequently (how frequently depends on school size). In fact, you may want to get clever and make 3 partitions. 1 main, 1 user data, and 1 unmounted that holds a local copy of your image file. Image your main partition only, copy it to your "hidden" partition, and image the whole thing for deployment.
4) Figure out a theft-protection mechanism. This will eventually become an issue. Laptop insurance/warranties will also be an issue. If 15% of the laptops begin malfunctioning near the end of a 4-year-run, that will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on those machines for classroom exercises. Nothing it more frustrating than having a whole lesson plan come to a stand-still because 4 kids' computers won't work. I've had it happen to me plenty of times. These also tend to be the kids who don't need any additional distractions.
5) If these are school-owned laptops, then you have a great deal of latitude in locking them down. Remote monitoring is another issue, and I would consult your district's attorney. As far as locking them down, the guiding question should be "what level of security supports the curriculum." Most slashdot users will think of these laptops as computers, with all of the implied potential. Thus any lockdowns curb that potential, and in turn the student's freedoms and opportunity. While this is a valid mode of thinking for personal machines intended for personal purposes, it is the wrong mindset to have in an educational environment. For starters, most students will never come close to tapping that potential (they want to surf the web and IM).
These laptops are being purchased to augment your curriculum, and should be configured in a way that makes it a platform for your curriculum. This may involve lots of restrictions, or just enough to keep a kid from accidentally breaking something. While you'll probably learn as you go, you should already have some idea of where that line is. If you don't, I'd recommend more research and consultation/training your teachers before writing that big check.
With totally unlocked computers, it is likely that a significant portion of the machines will begin malfunctioning due to user-abuse: "I'm going to install every piece of crap software I find! Isn't it great?" While it won't be a majority, it will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on the machines to function properly during an activity (see above).
These are more general points than some of the comments posted so far. Take them for whatever they're worth.
1) Go for the least restrictive options possible. If you treat kids like criminals, they're going to act like criminals. Public middle/high schools are enough like jails as it is already.
2) Some kids are going to figure out how to work around almost every restrictive measure you put in place, regardless of what you do. Expect that and when it happens, set the example and deal with it in a mature non-kneejerk way.
3) Related to #2, the kids are going to use the laptops for non-academic purposes. This should be encouraged because to do otherwise is running contradictory to the whole message of telling them to have this laptop and take it home. If you don't want them to use a general-purpose computer for general-purpose activities (communication, music, art, programming) then don't give them a computer.
4) Realize that 99.9% of the "problems" related to the use of the laptops are best resolved with non-technical solutions. If instant messaging in classes is an issue, have the teacher tell them to knock it off and pay attention to class. Don't just take away the chat program and leave it at that, because the underlying problem still remains. Cure the ailments, not the symptoms.
5) Above all, EDUCATE them on what's considered acceptable use of the computer and what's not. For the love of all that is holy, do not just give them the computer and then punish them for using it wrong. Kids have a natural tendency to explore their world and the things in it, don't help the school system destroy that inclination any further.
The lawyers will be drooling over this and be ready to sue on contact for any student who sees something inappropriate on myspace. Free money!!
Unfortunately this means you get the shaft as your in charge of settings. A single lawsuit could kill the whole program and your career.
Play it safe ban all search engines and most blogging and social websites. Google especially as students can google myspace proxy and get around filtering.
http://saveie6.com/
They should have NONE, NONE WHATSOEVER.
It is the parent's job to regulate what children do and don't do... it's as simple as that.
Period... enough said.. no justification beyond that should be needed. YOU are responsible for YOUR children's actions. P.E.R.I.O.D.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
This isn't true. For example, the majority of the population has driven while (very) tired. This is a crime, (impaired driving), for a very good reason - it increases the risk of accidents, almost as much as drinking. So, here's a law, that the majority of the population breaks, but isn't "wrong" as it punishes dangerous behavior.
I disagree. That law is wrong for many reasons, including the vague definition of "very tired" that means no one can be reasonably expected to tell if they are or aren't breaking said law. More importantly, however, is that just because a law increases the safety of the citizenry does not mean it is a good law. Cars are dangerous and if we keep driving them people will keep getting accidents even if they follow the laws. Is a law banning driving cars then justified? Freedom is the lack of laws. We need to balance the rights of individuals to act with the likely consequences of those actions on others. It is up to each of us to decide when we're too tired to drive and the law cannot make that decision for us no matter how hard it tries because it does not have the faculties to assess said state of being, regardless of if it punishes "dangerous" behavior. All driving is dangerous, but that doesn't make a law banning it just or driving "wrong".
Giving every student a laptop is an incredibly stupid idea.
What happens when someone gets a virus on theirs and all their work is gone?
What happens when someone's computer isn't working during a class activity due to some failure (software or hardware)?
What happens when a student damages their laptop, intentionally or otherwise?
What about someone stealing the laptop (not another student, but some random thief)?
What happens when (not if) someone reformat their machine?
What happens when (not if) someone bypasses the restrictions on their laptop?
Have the teachers been taught how to use a computer (a lot of teachers are idiots when it comes to this)?
Have the students been trained how to use these computers (there are some idiot students too)?
Why can't the students install other software? Do you seriously expect students to use these things if they can't customize them to their own personal tastes?
How much money is this going to cost the school district every year in terms of support staff and replacement hardware?
I'm going to go on a rant here:
School districts like yours have way too much money and unfortunately no one seems to have any idea how to spend it responsibly. The decision to give students laptops has already been made, without any type of plan for managing them (as evidenced by you asking slashdot what you should do).
It's stuff like this that pisses off taxpayers. "I agreed to increase my taxes and they spent it on a bunch of worthless computers?!?!?!?"
Don't be surprised if you get your budget slashed in the coming years if this program goes tits-up.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
None. And I don't say that lightly.
The risk is that kids will get into places we'd rather them not. Honestly, there's a lot of total trash on the 'net that adults would probably be better off seeing.
The risk, though, is that we train kids to be subservient to authority, which is bad for them and bad for a free society. As we've seen so much recently, many, many people and groups are quick to claim authority illegitimately. I'd really rather have kids grow up believing it's NOT ok for big brother to monitor what they're doing 24x7.
I'm opposed to the idea of "technology needs to be given to our kids" as if it were some kind of Recommended Daily Value -- it's a tool, it's a field in and of itself, but it's not something you can just throw at a classroom to make things "better" or kids more "technologically literate".
That was how braindead my highschool was.
But that's just my take on laptops in class in general. Assuming that you'll be doing it anyway...
I've read a lot of good points in the comments here (filter on the router side, not the laptop side being vital) but I figured I'd tell a parable in what happened to me.
In middle school, the computer lab had Foolproof to lock down the machines (a terrible security package, I might add -- really braindead) but there was a very open culture. If you hung out in the computer lab at lunch, and showed actual interest in computers, before long you'd know the magic keystroke to temporarily disable the lockdown (essentially, sudo privileges). And in this way we'd have files and games on the fileserver and play them at lunch; they trusted us, we returned the favor by not causing trouble.
High school was a different beast. They didn't trust us with anything -- and that we were being treated as more incompetent and less trustworthy than our younger selves was a major point of frustration. So what did we do? Circumvent the security in every way we could. Any door they left open, any trick we could pull, we pulled it.
Detente only came when, finally, they improved the network policy with a round of new computers that had Windows 2000 (as opposed to 98) and used proper ACLs -- that were clearly less restrictive in the general case. We could bring in USB keys, run software, but the machines were essentially reimaged every night. This was fair enough to us, so we went with it.
Why break the restrictions? Because they're there. The more restrictive, the more the desire. The more permissive, the less the desire.
But moreover, only a small fraction of kids will ever seriously butt heads against it. In the general case you can lock down the system to the bare minumum. But the kids who do hit the restrictions -- these are the kids you want to know. Trust them. Give them the keys. Help them play. Talk about your "teachable moments" -- treat them with respect and they'll do the same. They're not stupid -- it's not like we suddenly wisen up at 18. You might even change their lives.
The magic key in middle school was Cmd-]
First, a general premise: kids of this age deserve respect, but are not yet given all the privileges of society granted to adults, because they have not yet learned enough to use those privileges responsibly. This especially applies to privacy. If you disagree with me on that, you might as well stop reading now.
--
Anyway, my solution: let's just use the same principles we used for schoolchildren *before* everyone had computers. No more, no less.
Dial the clock back to 1985. Did we search every student's book bag for pornographic magazines as they entered the school? No, but if a teacher caught 'em with it, they'd be frogmarched to the principle's office. Besides, kids are really creative about hiding contraband, you're not going to stop them if they're determined to bring a Playboy to school. But if a teacher heard giggling in the boys' room, he'd investigate. In 1985, did we hand out pieces of paper on a strict quota system to prevent them from passing notess in class? No, but the teacher would stop note-passing when she spotted it.
In an Internet world, this translates into not locking the laptops down at all -- let them access any sites they wish -- but monitor their Internet usage at school aggressively and proactively. And tell them exactly what you're doing.
Teachers should have a packet sniffer app running on their own machines that shows the destination and type of Net traffic occurring in their classroom in realtime. Distracting activities like online games, IM chat, e-mail, etc. should be red-flagged for the teacher to deal with as she sees fit. On a broader level, the principal's computer should have a packet-sniffing app that permits her to monitor for issues of significant disciplinary concern -- not simply iChatting in class, but say, reading up on bomb and drugmaking information.
Of course, all this network monitoring only works on the school grounds, but that's the limit of the school's jurisdiction. What the kids do in their homes is up to their *parents* to monitor -- and hopefully, the school gives the parents a similar application to use at home.
The laptops could also have software to search for and report highly suspicious stored files which make their way onto the computers without passing through the school's network. It's easy to do with Spotlight. You'd have to verify the integrity of the searching application to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, of course. This is more draconian than network sniffing, though, so I'd call it optional.
The nice thing about a monitoring but not disabling policy is that it allows you to handle edge cases well. Twelve-year-old girl reading the Wikipedia page on preteen lesbianism (assuming there is one)? The school can choose to ignore it, or maybe give some guidance. Eighteen-year-old boy reading the same website? Possibly a different action.
With aggressive monitoring, just like in 1985, teachers can choose to take action on what they see or not... the important thing is to give them the tools to observe what's happening in their classrooms.
Someone's decided to hand out Macbooks to everyone. Presumably to get the funding to do this, they had to make out a business case for it, stating the cost, and giving an idea of the benefits. Was this reviewed by monkeys?
Jesus, if you have to hand out kit like this, what's wrong with a cheap netbook?
The obvious answer is you ensure that a client computer can't hurt the network. Filtering etc is done at the proxy, not the client. People can do what the hell they like with the laptop at home so long as a) they know if they bring it to school with pr0n on it they're hosed, and b) if they break it by installing stuff and tinkering that there's a cost or a time penalty in getting it fixed - i.e. you go to the back of the IT support queue.
That spending money on MacBooks is insane unless you're getting them for less than half of retail price. A reasonably good device can be had for $400-$500 retail as opposed to a MacBook.
My High School started a laptop program when I was entering my Junior year. They started with the Sophomores that year so I wasn't able to get one. However, I ordered myself a laptop to use in my own classes, but didn't have any "laptop" classes. My brother was in the initial class, though, and I knew a lot of his friends.
First, and foremost, if the school is fronting most of the money, don't get macs. They cost way too much. I would suggest either have the families pay for the laptop up front with subsidies for those who can't afford it or get something else. Acer is fairly reasonable as are a few other brands.
The one issue my school had was that they got them the shittiest laptops they could. Don't do this; nobody will purchase them upon graduation.
Second, stop buying dead tree books and find eBooks to run your classes on. It will save the school money and make upgrading easier. It'll also help the kids by not having to carry so much and they'll always have their books in class and at home.
Don't lock down the machines; they will find a way around it. Instead, lock any ports on the school's network you deem necessary and do any proxy blocking you can. If you see students using a proxy, ban the IP. It isn't as preventative as some more invasive tools, but it's a lot less trouble.
As for software, let them install what they want. If they bring it home, they should be able to do with it as they please. If they were school-owned and only used during class I can see restricting them, but they're not.
One last thing, the admin at my high school was incompetent. Find someone who knows what they're doing and for god's sake, backup their hard drives before you work on them or set up a network storage solution for kids' files. Our admin would just format and re-image when anyone had a problem for ANYTHING. The keyboard would break, reformat, just in case that was the issue before replacing hardware. A lot of my brother's friends stopped bringing their issues to the school because they would lose everything on their machines every time they brought it in.
Our program was ultimately shut down because the teachers weren't taking advantage of the laptops in class. This is the biggest problem. Use the eBooks, get software designed to augment their classes, and have teachers go through a rigorous computing course. If they don't know how things work, they won't use them.
-SaNo
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!
Are you f'in kidding me? I majored in a technical field and didn't even have my own computer throughout college.
the only thing a student in HS needs a computer for is writing papers and lab reports. There are labs for that. And those who want to learn computer stuff will certainly do so on their own, just like we all did.
I'm the IT director for a small private school. We are well on our way to having one laptop per student, and here's how we do it:
The computer is a tool to perform school tasks. Using the principal of least access, we only allow activities/applications that are related to classroom instruction.
We use MacBooks. No student has an administrative account. They are using the system, not modifying it.
We've enabled parental controls to keep track of the use of the laptop, and to prevent access to bad things on the internet. We also use a combination of OpenDNS, Cisco/Trend Micro filtering, Postini email filtering, and Sophos AV.
Teachers require the students to check in the machines each day. This allows us to keep track of the hardware.
We re-image machines if we have a problem. Students are required to keep their data on a flash disk, or on the servers at the school. If the data is not in either of those locations - too bad.
The bottom line is that if students don't like these restrictions, they are welcome to purchase their own computer, and do what ever they please, at home, under the supervision of their parents.
-ted
While still in high school I worked part time as a network admin for the school. We had just begun to incorporate a laptop program that started with the 6th graders. At time time our biggest trouble was students that bent the hell out of the wireless cards that stuck out of the side like a sore thumb. The reason that was the biggest problem was because our policy was one of educating the students about general best practices. If they came in with a trojan, adware, malware...whatever we just used ghost to set it up clean right away. The students lost all data important to them and gained in the lesson that we'd fix the computer but we're not going to hold your hand or save your data. Porn? not a problem on our network. We blocked what we expected and used a cron job to grep out any of a set of "naughty" words that came across the firewall. When any one user hit a certain threshold they were brought in for a "meeting". This was enough of a deterrent that by the end of the first month more teachers were brought in for meetings about acceptable network use than students. Even more surprising? It was an all boys school.
Important information that precedes any answer to the question you ask has either been left out, or not decided, and the description given is self-contradictory on some of the important parts that aren't omitted. For instance, you say students will "essentially own the machines" and then talk about their ability to purchase them after graduation, and state mandates for filtering on school machines. Neither of the latter two points are consistent with the former: student ownership means students don't need to buy them, and mandates that apply to school-owned machines don't apply to them.
Most importantly, you need a coherent idea of why you are spending the money to buy computers to give (or lend, as it seems from your description) computers to students. Once you know that, the uses and restrictions that are consistent with that will be much easier to determine, because you will actually have something to evaluate them against.
(Personally, I think once you know why students need computers, it might be better to decide on a common hardware/software platform that meets that need, communicate that it was required, and subsidize purchase and reasonable repair/replacement -- with a means test -- rather than the school buying computers for the whole student population and retaining ownership and responsibility for monitoring/controlling their use at all times, particularly if there are significant state mandates that apply to school-owned computers.)
---
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?
Asking how to restrict the laptops is the wrong place to start. By thinking about how you WON'T use the laptops, you've already lost the battle.
You need to first think about how the laptops WILL be used. For each class where the laptop will be used, the instructors must know exactly how to leverage them well enough to make their use an essential aspect of learning. If a student is busy using a laptop for a legitimate, in-class purpose, then they won't be off browsing p0rn -- at least not without the teacher noticing.
At any other time when the use of the laptop is not essential, simply turn it off and put it away. Don't allow the laptops out on the playground, or in the lunch room. They are strictly for classroom or home use only.
The point is to treat a laptop like a No. 2 pencil. It's just a tool, useful only in a certain context, and outside that context, we don't use it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
US public schools are facing gigantic budget shortages (even the wealthy ones here in SF Bay area) for the next two years due to reduced tax income and your school wants to buy each student a pricey laptop? Save the money for something else; your students probably have computers at home. If they don't, why not start a home PC subsidy for less advantaged students who qualify? That way all students may have access to a computer but the school doesn't have to deal with the associated IT burden. Think of it as subsidized school lunch for the next generation.
Having worked extensively with a private school in this situation exactly, we chose to have roaming profiles, which allowed the student to log in to each machine locally, but their work was synched to their class server next login on campus. While logged in on campus, all internet content is filtered, we use jabber and bonjour messaging locally and the kids love it, these services are not given wan access.
When the student is logged in off-campus they can make documents, and use the internet as their local administrator (parent/guardian) deems appropriate. In those environments, it is considered the responsibility of the parents/guardians to provide content filtering and/or monitoring of their child's internet use. As the students are just plain users, they have few rights with respect to system modification on their local accounts, any software that they wish to install is handled via a parental request form. Machine software images are netbootable so it's quite trivial to refresh each machine.
It's important to remember that if the student and their parents ostensibly 'own' the machines, they should be granted any leeway they request, yet not undermine the local regime. Well implemented network services can ensure that your local rulesets are followed.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
We have various filters in place. These filters are designed to achieve various goals.
One is to prevent bandwidth-hogging (we can't afford a gigabit fiber run to the Internet backbone, so we have to share our bandwidth wisely). Nor do we feel compelled to to pay for content that hinders the academic process (see below).
Another is to prevent "time wasters". How many schools let kids bring in their XBoxes to set up and play during class time? They are there to learn, not play games, socialize on Facebook, etc. I find it funny how many will rant about the situation of American schools vs. others, especially in math and science, and then go an suggest that kids be allowed to do whatever they want on their laptops during class. (BTW, our filters switch into a "relaxed" mode at the end of the day when kids are in study halls with little to do.)
Another is to protect them from things like online pornography, etc. I'm not even going to waste time as to argue why this is a good thing.
Another is to protect the network and their own computers from spyware, viruses, etc.. Our network is proactive in that it will cut off any computer that aggressively tries to "break out" or behaves like it's infected.
Since filters are not perfect, a report is generated weekly for each teacher, showing them exactly what sites their own students are visiting and during which classes. Technology can assist good classroom management, but it can never replace it.
- Michael.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Any content filtering should be on the network level, at the school. If the students are required to take the laptops home, then it should be up to the parents to provide whatever content filtering they like on their home network. It isn't the school's job to police what websites students visit while at home.
I'm also curious. Are students going to be required to take school laptops home with them, even if they have their own computer at home? I think this is a disastrous idea. First, laptops are heavy, and many students are already developing back trouble from lugging heavy textbooks home with them every day. Also there is a safety issue. Laptops are valuable, and there is a good chance they will be stolen while a student is on his way to or from school. Is the student or parent financially responsible for the loss? What if the student is injured or killed while being mugged for his/her laptop? This is already a big problem with iPods in some cities. Are you prepared for those inevitable lawsuits? Remember, not all students take a school bus. Many walk or ride a bike to school. If I were a parent at your school, I would simply not allow my son or daughter to take a laptop with them on their walk to school. Would this get them into trouble at your school?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?