Education Week - April 14, 2021 - 12

Teachers Are Watching Students' Screens During
Remote Learning. Is That Invasion of Privacy?
At first, Ramsey Hootman thought
something might be wrong with her
son's school-issued laptop. All of a
sudden, most of the browser tabs
he'd opened had closed, seemingly
of their own accord.
It took a little while to figure
out that the culprit was actually a
teacher, who'd used a tool called
Securly Classroom to view her son's
screen and close out all but two of his
tabs-an action that, to both mother
and son's frustration, gunked up an
assignment he'd been trying to research.
Remote classroom-management
tools like Securly Classroom and its
competitors give teachers an expansive, real-time look into what their
students are viewing or working on.
As Hootman discovered, they also
contain a panoply of features, like the
ability to freeze a student's screen, or
to call up, block, or limit tabs.
In interviews, some teachers said
they use the tools in productive ways
rather than to spy or punish, and that
the tools have smoothed out some of
the tough work of remote schooling.
But the systems also raise questions
about an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus in American schools.
" My main objection is the personal
level of the surveillance. It's not generalized; it's not a 'ping' from some
student who used some trigger word.
His teachers are looking, in real time,
at what he's doing, " said Hootman,
whose children attend school in the
West Contra Costa, Calif., district.
The companies that sell the products say the tools help replicate
good brick-and-mortar classroom
practices. Just like circulating about
a classroom, a teacher using them
can ensure students are on task, and
quickly assess who might need some
additional, personalized help.
But one thing is abundantly clear:
Use of remote classroom-management tools has undoubtedly increased over the last year as millions
of students learned full-time from
home.
Districts have scrambled to get
millions of devices into the hands of
students and to respond to the needs
of their teachers, most of whom have
never taught remotely before and are
desperately seeking ways to engage
students. And, noted privacy experts, the nation's experiment with
remote learning has blurred the line
between home and school to an unprecedented degree.
" When you're at home, this monitoring starts to feel much more invasive and creepier. But it is going to
continue long after students are no
longer primarily at home, " said Amelia Vance, the director of youth and
education privacy at the nonprofit
Forum on Privacy.
" So there's the need for clear information from schools that have in-

Brandon Laufenberg/DigitalVision Vectors

By Stephen Sawchuk

stalled these products, why they're
installed, what the data protection is,
and what the rights of students and
parents are, " she said. " It's something we rarely see in student privacy
conversations. "

How do remote classroommanagement systems work?
The monitoring of students' web
use is hardly new. Beginning with the
federal Children's Internet Protection
Act, in 2000, districts receiving federal school-connectivity funds had to
install internet filters on their hardware and devices to protect children
from obscene content.
Actual thumbnail-like monitoring of individual devices also dates
back decades. One provider of
classroom-monitoring software,
LanSchool, began in 1986, when all
school computers were hardwired
in labs.
The movement toward cloud
computing and increased fears
about student safety-coupled with
ambiguities in the CIPA law, which
did not detail where surveillance
should stop-means that as the tools
have evolved, they've grown more
powerful.
Two of the top companies in the
space, GoGuardian and Securly,
both got their start by providing
cloud filtering services to districts,
but have since expanded to other
products. Their remote classroom
management offerings are respectively known as GoGuardian
Teacher and Securly Classroom.

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 14, 2021 | www.edweek.org

The remote classroom-management systems work like this:
They are extensions to the Chrome
browser that are deployed on students' district accounts.
Teachers activate a session at the
beginning of a synchronous remote
class. Then, they can see thumbnails
of each student's screen, review the
tabs they have open, and scan the
web address of the websites they've
visited. They can also freeze students' screens, restrict the number
of tabs students have open, close
tabs if students are on YouTube,
Spotify, or other sites not related
to the day's lessons, and push out
links and messages to students. Students, for their part, can " raise their
hands " virtually to request help.
The systems do alert students
when a session is beginning. And
an extension icon or indicator in the
browser signals when their screens
can be viewed.
While designed primarily for
Chromebooks-by far the most
common classroom device-they
can be made to work on other hardware. And depending on how permissions are set, the services can
also work when a student uses a personal device rather than a district
one to access their school account,
if the Chrome browser is set up to
" sync " extensions.
Neither GoGuardian nor Securly's
products permit districts to turn on
device cameras remotely, or see
into students' homes, officials at
the companies underscored. (There
have, however, been a few snafus

stemming from how the services interact with other tech applications.)

Teachers say the tools enable
efficient feedback to students
Among teachers who regularly use
them, the tools appear to be broadly
popular.
Kathy Richardson, a high school
biology and marine ecology teacher,
teaches in the Louisa County, Va., district and for a regional online learning
collaborative. She's used GoGuardian Teacher for several years, and she
believes the pandemic has actually
helped refine her use of it.
Before, she said, she used it mostly
to make sure students were on task.
But now she uses it to pinpoint which
students need coaching on tricky
tasks like calculating a standard error
for their lab reports.
" For me, the biggest aid in using it
has been identifying where they're
getting stuck, where these misconceptions and misunderstandings are, "
she said. " Before, I would go back and
explain the whole section. Now I can
get very specific about what's wrong;
maybe it's a graphing issue, not a content issue. "
She likes being able to pop into
students' screens so she can suggest
they change their y-axis or put their
data into a bar graph. Sometimes, students ask her to view their screens so
she can double check their work. Most
of all, she said, it has made instruction
stronger during the pandemic.
" Even though the curriculum is a
little slimmed-down, I think they're

getting deeper in it than they would
have otherwise, " she said.
Enoch Kwok, the director of technology for the Oak Park district in
California, believes most of the school
district's teachers use it for similar
purposes.
" I don't think a lot of our teachers
are playing police and trying to catch
kids out. If you make the lesson relevant and engaging enough, students
will focus on that instead of goofing
off, " he said.
It is hard to say precisely how common the services are: They're often
bundled with the companies' other
security products. And like other privately held ed-tech firms, the companies don't share proprietary financial
data. But both Securly and GoGuardian officials said that their tools have
been popular.
The pandemic has accelerated interest in Securly Classroom, which
the company launched in 2019 after
acquiring its progenitor in a merger.
Even before COVID-19 hit, though,
the company was seeing tremendous
growth in its sales, said Jarrett Volzer, the general manager of mobile
device management and classroom
technologies for Securly.
GoGuardian, which launched the
Teacher service in 2015, offered it to
districts for free in the spring of the
2019-20 school year, after the pandemic caused nearly every school in
the country to shut down. About 20
million students and 14,000 schools
now use a GoGuardian service of
some kind, a spokesman for the organization said.

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Education Week - April 14, 2021

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