Live data from Hacker News

Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

eff.org

1–10 of 36 posts

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#5
Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a huge distraction in the classroom. Kids would be watching youtube videos, and worse, through the various proxy sites the school could never seem to block, all when they should have been paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised if performance dropped as a result.

That aside, I couldn't agree more with the issues in the report. There was no opt-out: no tablet meant no grades. You'd be a fool to expect any privacy. It was obvious school officials had some form of remote access: they could in theory lock the screen (this was easily circumvented by going offline), but to what degree, we couldn't be sure. For all I knew, they could have live access to the camera and microphone.

From this experience, it seems pretty clear that just throwing technology at students in hopes it helps them "learn" isn't going to work. The money wasted on this program could have been put to much better use, training teachers and actually buying books.

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#6
OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes? It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although the author did say he was using a throwaway.

link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#7
post #6

OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes? It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although the author did say he was using a throwaway. link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272

Somebody probably flagged it. It's a new account, so it's likely it could quickly be flagged into oblivion.

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#8
post #6

OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes? It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although the author did say he was using a throwaway. link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272

Was the comment ever alive? If the commenter has had other accounts banned, HN sometimes has more thorough methods of banning a user (I suspect by IP, but I'm not sure the details of the implementation). If you think the comment is worthwhile and have enough karma, you can vouch for it.

Re: Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

#9
post #5

Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a huge distraction in the classroom. Kids…

Computers have been heralded as the magic answer to teaching kids for 40 years now. There have been no positive results yet. It's not hard to see why - putting computers in the classroom is like putting labor saving devices in the gym.

Learning requires focused effort and work, there's just no way around it.

Post reply on HN