Double barrel moderation! BOOM! BOOM!
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Who me!?
Seeing as you spelled Wayzata wrong several timesâŚ
And the ACT is a college admission testâŚ
And Little Caesarâs isnât near the current or old high schoolâŚ
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So? What does spelling have to do with anything I said, and ACT can be an acronym for more than one thing you know.
Also now that you HAD to correct me because I was oh so INCORRECT, the program was called TAPâŚ
T.A.P. (The Alternative Program)
Also, we went to little ceasars everyday bro. We came back from lunch late almost every day.
PLUS, my memory from NINETEEN NIGHTY SIX MAY BE A LITTLE FUZZY.
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Much appreciated clarity, Nathan, thanks.
Not that shocking that the administration basically abdicates tech decisions to the people theyâve hired for it (not the most responsible thing, but at least not actively horrible). Looks like weâve got Wade Phillips and the policy board to most directly thank for this insanity?
For those who canât be bothered to call, he does have a twitter: https://twitter.com/wadelphillips. Perhaps just ask him why heâs wasting his time trying to punish a kid who could probably do his job better than he could? Maybe too harsh. But stuff like this puts a bee in my bonnet.
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Iâm another IT (asst.) director, also in Illinois. I built our custom filters, manage them, and wrote a good chunk of the policy that students (and parents) sign.
If I had to choose one thing on the internet to block, it would probably be comment threads. Come on, people!..but seriously, to have a productive discussion on why I do what I do, you should first read up on CIPA, en loco parentis, and the court precedents for student privacy while at school. Much of what this school is doing is a legal obligationâor they interpret it as suchâand Iâd bet that most of the districtâs parents actually want them to do it.
At our school, we block using stock blacklists. We also allow and block other sites as we need to. During last yearâs NCAA final four, I blocked every site I could find that was streaming basketball games. Maybe thatâs evil, maybe basketball is even educational, but Iâm not going to let Connecticut vs. Kentucky suck up 30% of our bandwidth.
Is filtering an irresponsible use of taxpayer resources? I doubt it. Your taxes paid for the cityâs fire truck, but you donât get to drive it to the park. Itâs somebody elseâs job to use it in the way it was intended. My job is make sure that our schoolâs internet is being used for education.
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Iâm a former network engineer who once worked in K12, much like TechTalkWRLR, and frankly a lot of what he is saying is accurate. One thing that I havenât seen though is a reasoned explanation of why these policies are in place.
It starts with federal funding. Thereâs a law called CIPA, or the Childrenâs Internet Protection Act. It was passed in 2000, and requires K-12 schools to filter the Internet. If the district does not comply, they will lose their E-Rate funding, which is how they are able to buy computers for the students that didnât come from a landfill. (Yeah, I know. They still look like theyâre from the dump, but it could be a LOT worse.)
So the administration has to decide which is more important: Your ability to have unfettered access to the Internet, or the ability of the school district to get as much money as possible, in order to provide the best education possible, in order to fulfil their duties to the community.
Another thing the OP never mentions is the impact that internet access on portable devices has for student learning. Yes, there are wondrous resources out there that can help students learn a lot. But you and I both know that a LOT of time in schools is spent by students watching music videos, watching facebook, vine, snapchat, or whatever. Time that isnât spent paying attention to the teacher or the task at hand. The teacher is also spending half their time trying to get the kids back on task to actually learn something, so that when conferences come around they donât have to sit there and try to explain how little Johnny managed to completely flunk algebra. âWell, he spends all his time on youtube and snapchat, and doesnât pay attention to the lesson.â âWhy arenât YOU stopping them from doing that??â
Lastly, donât blame the IT guy. If he was like me, he probably didnât care one way or the other about your internet access. Network engineers want the network to WORK. If he had been ordered to make sure everyone logged in to Facebook once an hour, he would have done that instead. But he wasnât told that.
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You sound very reasonable. Whatâs your take on software that allows school staff to control computers that are not on school property, like for instance software that can be used to watch children undressing in their rooms at home, or intercept their communications to other children which might contain ill-advised âsextingâ or nudity? Do you see policies that allow that sort of thing as a moral hazard, or not?
As a parent, Iâm not concerned with you making sure the schoolâs internet is being used for education - I applaud your decision to block the pro basketball streaming! But again, as a parent, I am very well aware that schools and churches have historically attracted certain types of people who are harmful to children, and I donât want anything to be going on in the school IT department that will empower or enable those people.
Edit: I suppose that I should disclose that I have done school IT as a volunteer in three different schools.
Thatâs a great solution for the affluent but it further exacerbates the divide between the haves â who have not only their own personal hardware but also individual liberty and freedom from surveillance â and the have-nots, who must settle for state-provided Orwellian spy tools disguised as learning devices.
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I hear you there. If I caught someone someday watching my little girl with spyware, Iâd be loadinâ up the old shotgun. I canât speak for all districts, but from what I saw you had teachers and administrators who wanted to put the latest, greatest tech in the hands of the kids, and trying to find some way to make it so that tech would be used for learning, not show up on craigslist or ebay, and not be used for cyberharassment, child predator targeting, etc, etc.
I remember that incident with the camera spying. It was awful. Personally, I wouldnât condone such software being used at all.
Another point Iâd like to make is that a lot of commenters want to paint the school teachers and admins as these weird, cartoonish figures that cackle gleefully as they stare into soviet-era spyscopes to catch kids in thought-crimes. But they arenât. Theyâre parents, and professionals who want more than anything to help the kids get a great future life. There are definitely bad apples, but most of the people I worked with were there because they believed in public education, and wanted to do whatever they could to help kids learn as much as they possibly could.
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Should students do whatever they want on a district owned computer or while connected to the district network?
Not for admins to decide. We use filtering to remain CIPA compliant and eligible for E-Rate funding which pays for our network. When it comes to social media, we delegate filtering to the teacher leader level. If one school uses Instagram, Twitter, etc. for their curriculum, go for it, however it is up to them to make sure their teachers and students are up to date with their cybersafety.
When it comes to student monitoring, IT services is not interested in private curiosities. Weâre only interested in student well being. If anything getâs flagged for potential harm, the right student support professionals are alerted. At the teacher level, they can review logs to see whether students are really on task. If not, they have actionable data to improve their practices.
Students should have freedom to explore, make mistakes, test limits and eat up mega bandwidth. They should also learn to behave responsibly while online at school. We donât punish. We believe in teachable moments and restorative justice.
This is good stuff, right?
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I am a giant fan of the simple âlittle piece of electrical tape over the cameraâ fixâŚ
Weirdly, while my employer never blocked BoingBoing, they did block the âhow to circumvent blocking software and read BoingBoingâ page that used to have a link on the homepage.
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Whatâs this about a âcontractâ and âfine printâ. I thought one of the points about being a legal minor was that you couldnât enter into contracts, and that any such contracts forced on a minor were unenforceable. What gives?
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Contact local journalists. The best thing to do is shine light on this. Also, reference the PA case with laptops; there, youâve done half the journalistâs job for them.
Start local; get a press release together maybe, release it on one of the many press release services, and itâll likely get the story picked up nationally. Administrators hate bad PR.
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Meh, you never know. I met a gal recently that graduated from my high school in 2006 right here in Ann Arbor. 'Tis a smaller world than we think in spite of the 6 billion inhabitants.
But with a very important distinction: any workplace that wants such a firing to hold up in court, and not have to pay a huge judgement for unjust dismissal, should communicate way more clearly to its staff what is and is not permitted, than it sounds like the school did in this case.
The OP reading the âcontractâ out loud so fellow students know whatâs in it would be totally irrelevant, because a workplace wanting such a practice to hold up in court ought to have employees review and sign the computer use and monitoring policy every single year, and make sure the manager or HR person on hand on that occasion understands it well and can answer their questions. Ideally a reminder of the policyâs existence and a URL where it can be read should pop up every time they log on to their work computers
Otherwise, the employeesâ reasonable default expectations of privacy are likely to prevail should the policy end up going to court. If itâs a policy the employees were informed of once upon hiring, and never reminded of again, itâs hard to argue they should have known to abide by it twelve years into their career at the company.
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Iâm a fan of the âgross incompetency of most people with computersâ theory. I once installed a filtering program because my stepson had discovered the joys of the unsavory side of the interwebs and along with that came tons of viruses.
This web filtering stuff is just the worst software known to man; itâs hard to know whatâs worse, the filtering software or the viruses that result if you donât buy it.
Likely the school installed the package without tinkering with the settings much. Consider that they might be open to a discussion about a better software option if itâs out there or make suggestions on how to adjust the settings of what they have installed to make it more useful.
PLUS, my memory from NINETEEN NIGHTY SIX MAY BE A LITTLE FUZZY
Right? Like, you totally mentioned the drugs thingâŚ
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