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Are the Kids All Right? These School Surveillance Apps Sure Want To Tell You (theoutline.com)
A number of businesses are rushing in to watch everything kids do on their school-issued tech, reports the Outline. From the story: As schools struggle to catch up with the fast-moving online environment, technology can seem like both the cause of and solution to life's problems. Increasingly, schools are turning to high-tech surveillance tools to supervise students online. As Nelson, who has worked in education for 20 years, told The Outline: "There has always been a small proportion of the student body that are going to be jerks or are struggling. With technology, they're able to [do harm] much more quickly and intensely."
[...] Apps like Apple Classroom, DyKnow, and ClassDojo extend these common disciplinary practices into online spaces. Apple Classroom and DyKnow, which bills itself as "classroom-management software for teachers," allow teachers to remotely lock students' computers or tablets into particular apps in order to cut off distractions and the temptation to cheat. These apps also let teachers call up real-time images of students' screens and histories of apps each student has used during class to check who has been following instructions and who was off-task.
[...] Apps like Apple Classroom, DyKnow, and ClassDojo extend these common disciplinary practices into online spaces. Apple Classroom and DyKnow, which bills itself as "classroom-management software for teachers," allow teachers to remotely lock students' computers or tablets into particular apps in order to cut off distractions and the temptation to cheat. These apps also let teachers call up real-time images of students' screens and histories of apps each student has used during class to check who has been following instructions and who was off-task.
The most powerful computer then was 16 bit. Most were 8 bit. There weren't these things. My mom didn't get text messages every time I got a grade.
Corporatism != Free Market
The public schooling has become a dangerous zoo of indoctrination and tribalism.
This once useful centralisation of resources has become corrupt; it's time to fall back to smaller solutions that are oriented explicitly for a particular community. Homeschool your children, or at least work with other families you trust to homeschool your children together.
There are lots of resources now available with the Internet to give our children an excellent education. There's no need to pay for enormous, gas-guzzling buses to fairy our children in the clutches of leftist indoctrination, the fraud of dumbed down curricula, and the dangers of low-IQ behavior from unruly, poorly raised children.
"Apps" aren't the solution. Instead, be a good, proactive parent. Guide your child into a productive, well-rounded, adulthood with the ability to think critically and independently.
CAPTCHA: banned
They are prisoners. They are not lacking a limb, but something of equal importance for human personality: Their freedom.
It's the opposite of *being alive* (in the metaphorical sense).
Statistically, crime has gone *down*.
Only fear has gone up. On a level that I have to call it a pandemic of mental illness.
We walked to school in the 80s. Or to the bus stop. Everyone. To first class even. (OK, this was central Europe. Don't know about the US.)
So logically, that should still be the case, and parents should be *more* relaxed. They aren't. That is called a delusion. It requires therapy.
Teachers are using online sites, tools to automate away lots of the work they do.
- Math practice questions are now a web site with dynamically generated problems and computer checked answers, Teacher does not need to grade anything.
- Vocabulary practice questions, antonyms, synonyms, pick the best work for a sentence, use the right verb tense, etc are online on a web site with computer checked answers. Teacher does not need to grade anything.
- Textbooks are now just paper and electronic based workbooks where you work it on paper then answer it online. Teacher does not need to grade anything.
- Testing follows the same pattern.
- Watch a video on Topic X for just about anything in K-12 education is online.
- Papers, tests, work sheets all done on Google docs
- PDF format assignments given out for the kids to print out at home and work and then turn in. Teachers don't even have to print empty assignments and hand them out.
- Lesson plans, sample tests, study guides, lecture notes and slides are now available online for small cost. Teachers need to do almost none of the lesson plan creation needed a few years ago.
Tech in the classroom is very little about helping Kids, it's about reducing the amount of work a teacher needs to do and very much reducing the education quality my children receive.
I do expect my kids to have classes which have no teacher and are entirely electronic based. That's not what I pay school taxes for. If it is that case, then K-12 education can be done all at home without the need for school builds, teachers, administrators, cafeteria workers, drivers, janitors, etc.
Does that mean we can get a 50% headcount reduction of the public school employees?
A bit of salt, seeing my kids turn computer based school assignments into video game substitutes.
They will soon learn that they are under surveillance, and that will have the usual effects: Stress, mental illness, lowered motivation and, in some, a far improved skill for deception. These would be the ones the article calls "jerks" or :struggeling". Pretty much all things you very much do not want to do to your kids. Child-abuse on or above the level of the anti-vaxxers.
On the plus side, this is the perfect preparation for life in the upcoming surveillance-fascism, so it may be a good idea after all...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Locking the devices to use a specific app or set of apps is totally fine. If they do that, they don't need to monitor what the kids are doing. And checking if the kids are on task?? That's dumb - either they complete the work and turn it in or they don't. This micromanagement is actually bad for kids. They need to learn values and consequences, not to be bodies in a police state.
Iâ(TM)m a big privacy advocate but even so, I can't really get worked up by this. A teacher should have the ability to manage content and focus in the classroom setting.
As someone who taught CompSci, I agree.
That said, a transparent proxy with a whitelist on it was once more than sufficient (a somewhat modified squid box was pretty much all I needed - if a student wanted access to something outside the whitelist, he/she sent a short internal 'email' with the URL, but that was rarely needed).
Then again, such a solution was sufficient in 1999-2005, even if the student was given unfettered access to the computers within the classroom - after all, desktops were the norm, and nobody took anything home with them. Not really the case today.
I do agree with these further measures above however on two (and only two) conditions:
* That camera/microphone access not be granted under any reason (seriously, kids keep these things in their bedrooms, and there is no valid use case for audio/video access by a competent teacher and/or administrator). A keylogger, screen-share, remote-lock, remote-wipe, app history, and a streaming log of URLs/files accessed (ELK, Splunk, whatever) should be more than plenty, with alerting to any tampering of protected files. (IIRC there was a huge kerfuffle a long while back where some overreaching school district demanded the ability to capture webcam video remotely, even in the students' homes... that died real quick once lawyers got wind of it, and for some massively obvious reasons.)
* No corporate access to any of the data, for any reason. Get your revenue off the licenses, and from nothing else.
Make this known up-front, and require a signed (by the parents) receipt and understanding of a basic EULA stating as much. It is school property, so the legality should be fine in most places (The EU may require a lot of additional precautions, but North America and most of Asia should be no problem.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That is, are you trying to create an educational program which generates cookie-cutter kids, even if it means pounding square kids into round holes to force them to become round? Or is your educational program designed to allow each kid to explore, discover, and improve their unique talents and abilities? Is the surveillance for the benefit of the state (making life easier for teachers and administrators), or for the benefit of the students (expanding their future job opportunities)?
Iâ(TM)m a big privacy advocate but even so, I can't really get worked up by this. A teacher should have the ability to manage content and focus in the classroom setting.
Barely even matters, there are parents who insist they do so, and who are sue happy. If they think their little Sally was corrupted by some evil that happened at school, and the school had the ability to stop it but did not, it's lawsuit time. "Having the ability" ends up being construed as there exists a SW package with a feature-set that makes the broad claim that it could have stopped X behavior. School did not adopt said package (even if it was completely broken to begin with), thus is culpable.
It's ridiculous in many cases, and I would make the argument that particularly for older kids, they need some freedom to do mildly bad things and experience the consequences (that are hopefully also only mildly bad) unfiltered by supervision, to learn just how horrible life really is on their own. For young kids, consequences are being punished by authority in most cases. The older you get, the more the consequences arise directly from the source and are usually much worse. It's important to learn that while the consequences are not dire, not release a bunch of 18 year old naive brats upon universities or the workforce and watch what happens, that's not good parenting either.
Part of that education used to be preparing you for college and a job where no one is going to hold your hand to get your work done. They shouldn't be watching over them and making sure they do what they are supposed to. That's the student's responsibility.
High Schools are graduating failures. If not failures in High School, then failures in College and the workforce. It would be so much better to prepare students for life. If they are going to fail in College let them find out before College and tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
I would not have had as much fun or experienced so much as a kid growing up if I"d been surveyed constantly like they are today.
Hell, if I were raised like they are today, I guess I"d have been taken away from my parents by protective services (I did play and run all over neighborhoods un-supervised for most any given day).....and likely my antics would have landed me likely on some terrorist watch list.
That and when I sit around with old friends, we trade stories of mischief we got into....thankfully no photo documentation of it to haunt our adult lives, but we do all remember and laugh about it over drinks from time to time.
I'll definitely trade my independence and ability to run all over the place unsupervised, and to spend genuine time in meatspace with friends I am still close with over these past decades, over the higher tech today....where you see kids on a date out heads bent over phones rather than interacting with each other, getting to know each other, etc.
Sure, growing up as I did...I failed, I fucked up...I got caught occasionally, but I lived and learned through it.
ON the other hand, I did have a film camera back in the day, and when it was out....I did make sure to keep all the negatives, if by chance anyone I grew up with becomes a senator or runs for president...so that I can a good job/compensation for keeping said negatives private.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Too late.....unfortunately.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For fuck's sake if you think kids are abusing their smartphones in class then just take them away or institute a policy whereby they're only allowed to have basic dumbphones with them at school, you don't start treating them like they're convicts in prison. Trust and respect work both ways. If you continually tell a kid he (or she) is bad, eventually they will believe it themselves and act accordingly -- creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Same thing happens by the way with minorities: if you tell a black kid and treat him like he's 'bad' his entire life, eventually he's going to give up and be bad because he'll see he just can't win. Kids of any background will react the same way. If you think you have to resort to the equivalent of putting a GPS ankle monitor on a kid then I say you're the one who screwed up, not the kid.
At the school: Firewall
On the devices: a really nice looooong hosts file.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
who was schooled in the 60s, and who doesn't have children of his own, I have to say that that I thank God that I'm not growing up or have kids today. My neighbours had their young grand kids ( 5 and 7 ) to stay for a month on their farm last summer and I was appalled by the stories they told of how parents are forced to raise their children now. They had to teach their grand kids that it was OK ( at the farm ) to just go outside and play in the yard or field whenever they wanted to, without having to ask for permission first. At home, if they were found alone in the park across the street from their home ( even though their mother could see them from her kitchen window ), the police would be called. Kids today are not being taught how to live in a real world, instead they are just being conditioned to live as obedient serfs and not think for themselves. If TPTB ( banksters, elites, globalists, whatever you call them ) haven't bought-stolen everything by the time today's kids reach adulthood, they can just sit back and tell their serfs to give the rest to them :-( .
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
the banks want it that way k-12 student loans!! that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
Not a chance. These places have zero-tolerance for anything lest they been seen as liable. Get around a firewall? Welcome to juvie, you little cyber-terrorist.
This is the natural result of a fear driven society. We are so risk adverse that we are steadily introducing and inviting more and more tyranny... and everyone knows that leads to misery, suffering, and conflict.
All, just to keep you safe!
I guess just tracking the ones charged with a crime wasn't enough.
Nope, no sig
Forced from an early age to follow somebody else's idea of a schedule. Taken away from their families for many hours a day. Not allowed to pursue the things that truly interest and excite them. Forced to learn things which they're not interested in. Taught that knowledge is acquired by being stuffed full of it and then regurgitating it, as opposed to living and learning organically in the real world in real situations. Encouraged to believe that learning is hard, and that there is only one right way and only one approved opportunity to study any given subject or discipline. Actively prevented from learning what they might learn easily and enthusiastically, because 'that's not what we're studying right now'. Discouraged from being individuals, from being 'different'. In some cases, all of this pounding of square pegs into the approved round holes results in "jerks or (those who) are struggling". In other cases it results 'merely' in people who fall far short of the potential they were born with. So what's the proposal for 'fixing' these students? Why, of course, the answer must be more monitoring, more hand-holding, more theft of their autonomy, more invasion in their lives - still more prescription, and still more proscription. Do educators and authorities really not get that doing the same shit over and over again and expecting a different result is a symptom of insanity?
I suspect public schooling damages children neurologically. There's a lot of talk about how people's brains don't really mature until they're in their twenties, yet there have been more than a few examples throughout history of people in their early teens starting successful companies, commanding troops in battle and winning, and so forth. What if the public schools' lack of real-world engagement and experience and autonomy starves young brains of the stimulation that would, via neuro-plasticity, mature those brains much sooner? What if the constant thwarting of their every impulse and inclination dulls children and pre-disposes them to apathy and/or anger and/or despair? Just to be clear - yes, I AM theorizing that school might cause brain damage. I'm fairly certain that in many people it causes soul damage. It did in my case.
Anybody who is disgusted and saddened by the Orwellian interventions described in TFA really should read John Taylor Gatto's 'Underground History of American Education'. It totally changed my view of both the efficacy and the purpose of public education as it has been practised during the last century. The book is out of print, but is available in PDF as a free download - check it out via your favourite search engine.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
... not release a bunch of 18 year old naive brats upon universities or the workforce and watch what happens, that's not good parenting either.
Too late. Anybody calling for, say, "save spaces" at a university has no business being there in the first place. An adult is expected to be able to fend for himself/herself to some reasonable degree. Those that cannot or are unwilling to are not adults, but children in adult bodies and a huge problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And thereby anybody at least a bit enterprising and at least a bit capable of thinking independently gets filtered out. Without those people, society dies eventually, because the others cannot hack it on their own.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We've handed 100% of our children's k-12 performance data over to google, and 100% of our children's web surfing habits to various surveillance companies.
The real rub being that in an effort to appease the think of the children crowd Google has promised not to advertise to the students 'on this device'. The between the lines on this being that the student's profile follows him to any other computer system he signs in on.
Everything about the arrangement of chromebooks (or i-books, or whatever the local flavor may be) in the classroom is a life-long privacy nightmare for an entire generation of Americans, and nobody even seems to care.
One of the biggest most powerful data brokers the world has ever known will now know exactly how well an entire generation scored on every academic test/project/assignment they ever took. This is the tradeoff our public school system has made in our names, in a bid for convenience on the teachers part.
Last year, I tried as hard as I could to gain an exemption for my student against use the school issued chromebooks, we are happy to use our own device, and the entire student facing suite of tools is a web-portal that can be accessed by any device. Nobody had even considered a parent would not want their student to use them, and eventually I was told I can revoke my permission to use the device, which will doom my child to not being able to use IT systems in class at all. It was clear to me in the 3 months I worked this that none of the school officials had even read the user agreement or privacy policy that comes along with these devices.
This year I already knew how unorganized and uninformed my local school was regarding this technology, so I just told my student to tell them he had an exemption on the first day. It stuck. He still carries and charges the chromebook for specific test and such, but he is now in charge of his own device, and is learning the value of his personal data, how to be responsible and safe online, and how to take steps to limit the baked-in surveillance of the modern web. He knows this is a privilege, and he knows any abuse of this arrangement will end it. We got lucky, but my point is that it's still possible to take back control.
At a minimum, these devices should come with mandatory privacy training, and it needs to be clear to the student what data is being archived by what companies.
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-...
https://www.eff.org/document/f...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://appleinsider.com/artic...
The situation is all the way bananas, and nobody seems to care.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I am sending my 11 year old over from Europe to US for a robotics competition (Vex IQ). They will be accompanied by a teacher.
Biggest part of "training" is telling them what is disallowed in the US.
Do not be alone, ever. In the mall, on the streets, in the airport, anywhere.
At home the 11 year olds roam the town alone. They go to school or gym, they visit friends, use public transport - all alone. They know their way around and there is no crime to be afraid of.
In US, which is as safe a country as any European one, they cannot and must not.
The kids take those rules with disbelievement and some amusement. "Imagine if someone would call a police if I walked to school." But they are smart boyd and I am sure they will behave as told.
Just...
why???
Who are you?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
If they think their little Sally was corrupted by some evil that happened at school, and the school had the ability to stop it but did not, it's lawsuit time.
On the flip side, if you think that parents in 1960 were willing to let little Sally just wander any red light district in the world, I'd like some of what you are smoking.
The internet has changed everything, for good or for ill.