iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"Hundreds of apps can follow your movements and share the details with advertisers, retailers and even hedge funds. Here’s how to limit the snooping."

In this week’s installment of EduTech, we’re going to break down the best apps on iOS stay organized, keep track of assignments, and more. Some of these apps are specifically made with education in mind, while others were developed with a broader focus yet still offer benefits to educators and students alike.

Over 50 million k-12 students will go back to school in the US this month. For many of them using a school computer, every word they type will be tracked.

Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators.

These Safety Management Platforms (SMPs) use natural-language processing to scan through the millions of words typed on school computers. If a word or phrase might indicate bullying or self-harm behavior, it gets surfaced for a team of humans to review.

In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has case studies where an intercepted message helped save lives. But the software also raises ethical concerns about the line between protecting students’ safety and protecting their privacy. 

“A good-faith effort to monitor students keeps raising the bar until you have a sort of surveillance state in the classroom,” Girard Kelly, the director of privacy review at Common Sense Media, a non-profit that promotes internet-safety education for children, told Quartz. “Not only are there metal detectors and cameras in the schools, but now their learning objectives and emails are being tracked too.”