There is a fine line between respecting student privacy while also ensuring that students are not exposed to disturbing or harmful website content. New technology can reduce frustration while keeping students safe by giving teachers a more active role in content filtering and student safeguarding.
Concerning websites that are allowed in schools, IT leaders have typically remained conservative, applying strict controls for web traffic while also blocking entire domains like YouTube. To protect students from harm, filtering technology scrutinizes their internet searches for concerning actions that trigger alerts and intervention if needed.
Every teacher has experienced the frustration of needing to get their students to a particular website and not being able to get the restriction lifted quickly or in some cases, at all.
Consider this example:
Mr. Creighton is teaching a unit on Elizabethan playwrights. This semester, he lets students pick any work of their choice and one student picks Romeo and Juliet. The student is Googling terms like suicide, death by poison and teen romance. Consequently, the global filters set up by the IT department generate an alert notifying the assigned staff that an intervention may be needed. Because this is only one student and this is the first semester Mr. Creighton has had a student writing about Romeo and Juliet, no one has the situational context to realize this isn’t reason for immediate action.
It is an easy matter to clear up this situation once engaged but if Mr. Creighton was given local control of content filters and alerts, he could have made it easier to manage and potentially avoid unnecessary worry, especially if the student’s parents were contacted. Applying new filtering capabilities and artificial intelligence allows teachers to be more essential to safeguarding in the following ways.
Observations about students can be easier for teachers to make and share with colleagues and staff.
Teachers know their students better than anyone else on the school grounds. They know which students are chronically late, disengaged or distressed. They are also more likely to notice changes in behavior or shifts in the quality of student work that could be indicators of larger issues. This information is valuable to other teachers and school personnel charged with keeping students safe.
The classroom management platform teachers use is the most logical place to make these notations since most teachers have these tools and use them daily. Engaging the teacher this way could have prevented the escalation of the above situation. In Mr. Creighton’s case, he could note that his student’s research for Romeo and Juliette was the reason for the alarming search terms and that all is well.
More from DA: How to target student outcomes through esports
If the opposite were true—that the student’s traffic was unexpected and Mr. Creighton was worried about those searches and he had observed signs of distress or changes in the student’s behavior—he could have made a notation in the classroom manager.
Not only would that be helpful to other teachers, it could have been critical to ensuring the students’ wellbeing. Mr. Creighton’s colleagues might pay closer attention and when several notes had been made, intervention could be engaged much more quickly.
Teacher control in content filtering and website access can better inform the process and people responsible for keeping students safe.
Continuing Mr. Creighton’s example, if he had more local control, he could not only unblock a website a student needed, he could track the keywords that matter to the class lesson at hand.
Empowering teachers to use filtering technology as a partner in classroom management and giving them local control at the classroom manager level allows them to safely use sites like YouTube and other traditionally blocked sites.
Their students might need access to social media for a day for a unit on misinformation. Advances in filtering make this possible. When broad restrictions are in place the teacher has to request an exemption from IT. Giving teachers local control is more efficient and effective.
In a very practical and specific way, AI can also be applied to automate some of the teacher’s actions. To clarify his student’s Google searches, Mr. Creighton could make a note about the project in the classroom manager more quickly. The AI has learned some of his common notations and has anticipated the words he needs to type.
It’s a step above autocomplete and quickmarks. Without having to create those quick marks himself, the AI—in its confined domain—learns from his previous entries, which makes each subsequent one much faster.
Spending more time with students and less on solving access problems is equally if not more important than the technology used to safeguard students. These advanced capabilities in content filtering are readily available and teachers are already heavy users of classroom management systems.
Bringing the two together is a significant technological innovation in the quest to safeguard students, and it allows our teachers to build those student-to-teacher relationships that make learning so rich and students safe.
