Are the Kids All Right? These School Surveillance Apps Sure Want To Tell You (theoutline.com) 79
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.
Re:Then you lack the experience and imagination. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Then you lack the experience and imagination. (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re: So? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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 n
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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-se
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Too late.....unfortunately.
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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.
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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.
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... 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.
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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.
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Naa, god is an illusion of your own creation, and his main occupation is fucking your mind. As an atheist, I do not have that. Feels nice.
I am glad that I went to school in the 1980's (Score:1)
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.
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We're also slaughtering, killing and oppressing fewer and fewer people each passing year.. Coincidence?
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Homeschool (Score:1, Insightful)
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 b
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I imagine your newsletter and website are not making it to the whitelists?
the banks want it that way k-12 student loans!! (Score:2)
the banks want it that way k-12 student loans!! that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
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You have a logical problem there: Being "productive" does not go with "the ability to think critically and independently" in a society that is utterly fucked up and wants nice, little, timid corporate drones as employees.
Kids under surveillance are ... not alright (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Smaller cheaper schools add up to cost more money. Scale has advantages and disadvantages. Small independent schools do not have the resources to handle outliers. Public school districts could be much cheaper if they focused on the most normal 90%, and ignored the needs of the students at both the top and bottom of the bell curve like in the Goode Olde Days. If they do not fit in, just ignore them or kick them out.
There are reasons that Gifted children were once categorized under the law as having a lea
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Any but the very most sparsely populated areas have schools big enough to handle all but the wildest extremes
You know this how? I have talked to parents of children with special needs, and it is very common for them to put them on a long bus ride to that one special school in the district to find teachers with the appropriate training, and these are reasonable wealthy suburban districts. So those schools that look "big enough" to you do not have the resources you think they do. Perhaps they could, if only we stopped pretending that they have too much money.
The very idea of merit is eroding under pressure from
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On a level that I have to call it a pandemic of mental illness.
Oh, yes. People that do not grow up and never have learned how to get their fear under control. It does not get more dangerous and destructive than that.
Automation in schools (Score:1)
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 wh
Very bad idea (Score:2)
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...
Re: Very bad idea (Score:1)
We live in the Surveillance Age and so do those kids. Their kids and their grandkids will, too. Knowing how and when to exercise self-censorship and how to conform are now essential survival skills. One misstep can have dire consequences. They sooner they learn how to live under the Panopticon, the better.
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You seem to be functionally illiterate. Don't worry, it is quite common these days. Here is some more explanation for special-needs readers such as you: I wrote "surveillance-fascism", you wrote "surveillance". These are not the same thing, as can be seen easily by the first one being two words and the second one just being one. I trust you can count to two? Now, on the subject, the US is clearly already a surveillance state, it is not yet fascism, although there is, among others, a "stable genius" hard at
Yes, The Kids are All Right (Score:1)
I Can't Explain, but after riding The Magic Bus I Can See for Miles - all the way to Baba O'Riley's. It's made me one Happy Jack - maybe I'm on my way to becoming a Pinball Wizard!
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Who are you?
Depends what you do about it (Score:3, Interesting)
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)?
When do they learn personal responsibility then? (Score:1)
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
Creepy as fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
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So far as machine conveniences doing too many things for us, I agree. Remember Wall-E? That's where we're heading, having people be dumb, dumb, dumb, because they don't have to really learn to do anything themselves, there's always some machine or software to do it for th
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Trust and respect work both ways.
This is a thing authoritarians do not understand. They think they can _demand_ respect, just because it is _obviously_ them that keep society from collapsing. In actual reality, things are the other way round and anything were authoritarians have taken over has eventually collapsed. It is a stage in any power in decline.
Firewall much? (Score:2)
At the school: Firewall
On the devices: a really nice looooong hosts file.
As an old fart ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Fully agree. The only thing these rules about not being allowed to do anything by yourself, is creating little obedient serfs.
There's the other shoe (Score:4, Insightful)
Giving them more of what made them sick (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Extremely short sighted (Score:2)
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 flavo
European children visiting US (Score:2)
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 Europ
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City living busybodies make that a reality.
Rural areas not so much.
Try to make time to get out of the city while you're here. It really is a night and day difference.