As a teacher as well, I have to confirm both accounts. Firstly, that teachers actually have very little power over tech policies, and are the largely at the mercy of school board members who may not all be as informed of the issues.
But I have to say that I encountered some of the same foolishness myself: wide vulnerabilities, resistance to free and OSS, lack of proper training for teachers, and so on.
A bizarre expenditure of money. Let's just say that our school libraries and materials budgets are not quite what they used to be.
Oh yeah, free is definitely good, but within the law. Which is why we have installed the win32 version of the GIMP instead of Adobe Photoshop. Show kids that much of the stuff they are pirating is separated from open source projects by licensing and marketing, not quality.
I'm a teacher/sysadmin at a Canadian High School, and my opinion is: kill P2P anyway. School computers are about education and turning young folks on to technology.
Teachers sucking bandwidth leave less for students Although it is great that the teachers are having a great net experience, but the whole idea is to build the next generation, who probably are experiencing painfully slow and frustrating net connections. Explain to the teachers and bosses that teacher abuse of bandwidth is stealing a exhaustible resource from the kids.
Teachers downloading warez is not an appropriate model for young people Not only in there a moral aspect to this, but a legal one to this as well. Consider the not-impossible notion of a license audit. You are the first person they are going to ask, and the person who will be considered most cupable if anything is awry. Want a good reason? Print out some of the BSA v. School Board disputes and give them to your superior. You'll be able to dictate the board-wide memo after that!
Security I don't think I have to say much more about this. Do a security sweep for trojans, viruses and backdoors. Give the results to teachers and bosses, noting that many of these uglies can easily be passed to their home computers, and those of the students. For drama points, remotely change a senior persons' wallpaper. (Well, maybe not.)
It does smack like censorship, (especially since it concerns schools), but if you are like most school sysadmins, you have *way* too much stuff to do to worry about people doing things that make your life harder in terms of legal obligation and workload. Teachers are a pretty moral group, and they will snap into place if asked, or more drastically, if firewall rules break their toys. Just tell them that it the way it has got to be, and throw technology behind that to enforce it: the kids get smarter, your job gets easier, and the whole board is in a much better legal situation.
At the high school at which I teach art, I have taken on creating an web front-end to an attendance database. It is interesting how the project arose: a new, quite strict attendance policy was born, which had the nasty effect of removing a large chunk of my students from the school. (More often than not, they were thriving in my class, but were cutting one of the others, putting their enrollment in jeopardy.) I developed a monitoring system so that (surprise!) parents and students could monitor themselves to make sure that they weren't kicked out!
It has become quite popular among the students and parents. About 40% of the students have signed up for it voluntarily, and less than 5% of the parents have signed up, even though the URL is placed on the automated attendance warning letters.
It is interesting what concerns came up during the development of the program:
Teachers are frighteningly overworked, and haven't the time to monitor kids behaviour.
Principals and VPs are so busy with dealing with budget horrors and extreme discipline problems to deal with minor problems, like the kid who likes to take sunny Fridays off.
Many, but not most, parents are not able to take a more watchful eye over their kids, because of double-income families, work-pressures, and what have you.
This leaves the kids, of course, to monitor themselves, which is exactly what they do, and exactly who should be responsible for it in the long run. I really love the fact that I have a large number of kids who were able to use my program to watch their own bum, and not exceed the absence maximum and get kicked out of school.
In this case, I think the monitoring is to the benefit of the kids. I plan on doing more work, to include things like intelligent course selection, online awards applications, and so on...
I have to second this. If you are comfortable coding in HTML, and simply want the typographical and page control that lacks in browsers, HTMLDOC is a brain-dead easy way to generate consistant PDF files from HTML. I use it a fair bit myself, and appreciate it's directness.
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As a teacher as well, I have to confirm both accounts. Firstly, that teachers actually have very little power over tech policies, and are the largely at the mercy of school board members who may not all be as informed of the issues.
But I have to say that I encountered some of the same foolishness myself: wide vulnerabilities, resistance to free and OSS, lack of proper training for teachers, and so on.
A bizarre expenditure of money. Let's just say that our school libraries and materials budgets are not quite what they used to be.
Oh yeah, free is definitely good, but within the law. Which is why we have installed the win32 version of the GIMP instead of Adobe Photoshop. Show kids that much of the stuff they are pirating is separated from open source projects by licensing and marketing, not quality.
I'm a teacher/sysadmin at a Canadian High School, and my opinion is: kill P2P anyway. School computers are about education and turning young folks on to technology.
Although it is great that the teachers are having a great net experience, but the whole idea is to build the next generation, who probably are experiencing painfully slow and frustrating net connections. Explain to the teachers and bosses that teacher abuse of bandwidth is stealing a exhaustible resource from the kids.
Not only in there a moral aspect to this, but a legal one to this as well. Consider the not-impossible notion of a license audit. You are the first person they are going to ask, and the person who will be considered most cupable if anything is awry. Want a good reason? Print out some of the BSA v. School Board disputes and give them to your superior. You'll be able to dictate the board-wide memo after that!
I don't think I have to say much more about this. Do a security sweep for trojans, viruses and backdoors. Give the results to teachers and bosses, noting that many of these uglies can easily be passed to their home computers, and those of the students. For drama points, remotely change a senior persons' wallpaper. (Well, maybe not.)
It does smack like censorship, (especially since it concerns schools), but if you are like most school sysadmins, you have *way* too much stuff to do to worry about people doing things that make your life harder in terms of legal obligation and workload. Teachers are a pretty moral group, and they will snap into place if asked, or more drastically, if firewall rules break their toys. Just tell them that it the way it has got to be, and throw technology behind that to enforce it: the kids get smarter, your job gets easier, and the whole board is in a much better legal situation.
It has become quite popular among the students and parents. About 40% of the students have signed up for it voluntarily, and less than 5% of the parents have signed up, even though the URL is placed on the automated attendance warning letters.
It is interesting what concerns came up during the development of the program:
This leaves the kids, of course, to monitor themselves, which is exactly what they do, and exactly who should be responsible for it in the long run. I really love the fact that I have a large number of kids who were able to use my program to watch their own bum, and not exceed the absence maximum and get kicked out of school.
In this case, I think the monitoring is to the benefit of the kids. I plan on doing more work, to include things like intelligent course selection, online awards applications, and so on...
I have to second this. If you are comfortable coding in HTML, and simply want the typographical and page control that lacks in browsers, HTMLDOC is a brain-dead easy way to generate consistant PDF files from HTML. I use it a fair bit myself, and appreciate it's directness.