When your student logs on to their chromebook at school, they're not alone.
It's highly likely that someone -- or something -- is monitoring their activity.
How much is being watched depends on the school district.
Listen to Part Two of our series on student surveillance
Instruction used to take place on a chalkboard.
Then came iPads and Chromebooks.
In many districts textbooks are being phased out and these devices are now necessities.
"We typically have a discussion with them at the handout: these are the basic rules and don't forget, we can see what you're doing."
Pretty much every student in the Rockwood School District gets a school-assigned device -- either a tablet or chromebook. Rockwood Chief Information Officer Debra Ketring, "we're giving them the opportunity to act in accordance with our policies and procedures... until they don't"
Whether it's a district owned or a personal device, there's no expectation of privacy if you're using the district network. "When a user is on our network... yes we have a right to restrict access to protect our environment... it's really to protect our environment"
Ketring cites the Children's Internet Protection Act, telling KMOX the district is responsible for monitoring and preventing student access to obscene or harmful online content. Rockwood uses a content blocker. It's based on a long list of categories. Click here for a link to what's off limits.
The filters vary by grade level, but some of the taboo categories include: adult content, anything related to alcohol, drugs, botnets, chat rooms, dating sites, gambling, and terrorism.
But at Rockwood, the content blocker is where continual monitoring stops. "We will investigate if someone brings a concern to us," points out Ketring, "but we're not actively monitoring for those key words."
What she's referring to is technology that scans all student online activity -- chats, emails, word programs, web searches. It then flags key words.
That in turn triggers alerts to school officials, sometimes even law enforcement. "There's also been a lot of discussion in legal circles and other circles about the ethics and legality of some of the monitoring," adds Ketring, "We haven't gone there."
Listen to Part One of KMOX's series on online student monitoring
Plenty of other school districts in our region have.
"That's reading everything that's on a student's screen," computer monitors behind him on his desk, Parkway School District Chief Information Officer Jason Rooks describes what he calls "Wellness Monitoring".
"It's constantly reading that text that's on the screen and trying to assess,
is the student accessing something they shouldn't? Is the student researching topics related to self-harm, or harming others, or bullying?"
Parkway uses a platform called LineWize, a product that sells itself as "protecting every child's digital journey."
He admits, it's not always perfect. But Rooks tells KMOX the technology has gotten better compared to the first systems Parkway used "it used to be literally a list of words"
That led to a lot false alarms. "It was a student researching something associated with the Civll War, and it would generate an alert because there was obviously guns and death and violence associated with the Civil War.'
Rooks tells us, artificial intelligence has helped with context. "What was the student doing immediately before this word triggered, and what was the student doing immediately after, and is that word associated with a reputable, known educational site or resource, versus a student that is searching Google for how to obtain a gun or how to use a gun. that will actually trigger a higher level alert and garner more attention than a student doing research for an assignment."
For the most serious alerts, a human being has the final call. If there's imminent danger, school officials start a call chain to ensure a student is safe. "I view that as the approach Parkway has taken is not, we're out to get anybody," adds Rooks. "We want to ensure that our students are leading safe and healthy lives considering a great portion of their lives is now being spent online... that's where we've had to move our focus to, because that's where our students are at."
Critics say the technology has backfired and instead of keeping students safe, it's being used for discipline. KMOX explores that in our next report, airing Wednesday, April 19th at 5:22 am, 8:35am, or 5:22 pm.
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