Computer Usage Policies

Schools today generally have a computer usage policy, and during back to school season they will ask parents to sign a release form granting the child access to the school's computers. That document will likely also outline the types of use that are considered acceptable, and will ask parents to take responsibility for any damage their child causes or any failure of a child to follow established rules.

I have come to feel these usage policies often put parents between a rock and a hard place. It's really tough to refuse your child access to the school computers, as teachers tend to incorporate some form of computer work into the curriculum even in the earliest primary grades. In Quebec high schools, students are required to produce such things as PowerPoint slide shows for their provincial exams. This can sometimes be a group effort, and teachers set aside a number of lecture periods during which the students go to the computer lab to work on these projects. What is a student to do if his parents have refused to sign the waiver?

And yet, what guarantee do we as parents have that the school will be supervising our children adequately while they are online? Do we even know what sites the teacher or the school considers appropriate, and what sites are forbidden? It's one thing to object to a student's use at school of a site we feel is objectionable, but what about when the site just seems to have no educational value? What about when educational sites are being blocked arbitrarily?

In my experience, the average primary teacher has very little understanding of computers or internet. When my girls were in public school, most of the teachers had a computer that sat unused in a corner of the classroom until sometime in November, because the teacher was waiting for the board to send someone from IT to plug it in. I kid you not!

Most teachers we asked for their email address didn't have one - at least not one they were willing to share with parents. One teacher told me she did, but as there were a limited number of computers in the staff lounge she wasn't able to access her account on a regular basis. Did she not know how to do it from her own classroom computer? Could she not figure out out to access it from home?

When my oldest was in the second or third grade, her teachers were more positive about computers. One of them wanted to teach the kids how to build a web site, which was wonderfully encouraging as the school's web site was at least three years out of date at that time, and no one even bothered to answer messages sent to the school's official email account. This was in a time when many teachers were beginning to set up classroom blogs and to update them daily so parents could keep up with homework assignments, school memos, and upcoming events.

The kids ended up using some obscure educational program I'd never even heard of that year, to "build their school portfolio." They went to the lab once a week for a period of several months, and in the end they had maybe one or two pages of pretty meaningless content, none of which really exemplified anything they were learning in their other 24-1/2 hours a week of school. Apparently they had spent a lot of their time surfing "educational" web sites like the ones set up to promote products like Barbie and My Little Pony. Not doing media awareness or anything, just "learning" to surf and play online games.

Some schools use blocking software to keep kids from going to sites they feel are inappropriate. In some schools whole domains such as blogger.com and wordpress.com are blocked, because the sites hosted there might contain objectionable material. Some of this cyber babysitting software blocks individual pages based on the occurrence of banned words. Good luck to the student who needs to do a project on breast cancer, who wants to find a poem about little robin redbreast, or who needs to write up a nutritional comparison for pork chops versus chicken breasts!

When teachers are ill prepared to teach kids about computers, and when they rely on automated systems to police usage, it makes me really nervous about what kids are doing with computers in schools. How many students with teachers like this can run cyber circles around their instructors? They know how to bypass the school security that their teacher doesn't even understand, so it isn't doing much to protect them even from the genuine threats that are out there on the net.

Perhaps even scarier is discovering that some teachers are posting public instructions on how to bypass school computer security. I found a post today on a blog called the Plugged In Teacher, which although it is probably aimed at teachers, is certainly also read by students and maybe their parents too. The post was called "How to Access Blocked Web Sites," and it linked to a site that it promised would show teachers to "sneakily access" blocked web sites from their computers at work.

Hello! Give any thought to the fact that you're sharing this information with the whole world? And because this teacher has registered a domain name, this particular page will not necessarily be blocked by a school network that filters free blogging and social networking web sites. So yes dear teacher, your own students may just be able to read that very post at school. They can use school computers and a blog created by school personnel, to learn how to bypass the security measures your school has put in place to keep them safe. There goes any student who didn't already know how to get around the security measures that apparently confound the faculty members.

Wow, that's a great job you've done of acting in loco parentis! I know I'd object to my kids being taught by an individual with such a spectacular lack of judgement and discretion. Honestly, you couldn't have kept this to yourself if you thought it absolutely necessary to circumvent school security? You couldn't quietly email the link to a few select colleagues?

Or wait! You couldn't actually address the type of security the school uses, and work with your colleagues and your school district to create the kind of changes you feel would allow you unfettered access to the sites you need in order to properly perform your job from school? What message do you think you're sending to the kids you teach by making a conscious choice to so openly flout the school rules? If you don't have trouble with classroom discipline or kids going behind your back to cheat, don't be surprised when it happens. That's what you are teaching them to do when they disagree with the rules, dear teacher. At the very least.

I've long been a believer that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it seems to me this is an example of just that phenomenon. Whether it is a matter of a not really too tech savvy teacher (or student) mindlessly passing on a link that lets them use school resources for their own recreational ends, or whether it's a person who legitimately feels the school's computer safety policies are too restrictive, circumventing them and teaching others to do it too is ultimately going to create more problems than it resolves. Don't cry too loud when the kids you're teaching decide they can break any rules they want, as long as they can find a sneaky  way to do it.