

Learning Apps Outstrip School Oversight, and Loss of Student Privacy Is at Risk - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/technology/learning-apps-outstrip-school-oversight-and-student-privacy-is-among-the-risks.html?ref=technology

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kendallpark
This is worrisome especially considering the fact the private information at
stake is that of minors.

I personally believe schools are too quick to jump on the "new tech" bandwagon
without actually evaluating whether their new shiny apps are actually more
effective in teaching than the traditional methods. It's like the CSMP madness
x 10. You have schools promoting "one laptop per child" when numerous studies
have some that laptops in the classroom decrease material retention. A lot of
these additions are just so the schools can look better on paper.

I remember when my high school installed smartboards under some upgrade-tech
initiative. Very few teachers actually need the extra capabilities that
smartboards had. It was all so they could impress parents with their "state of
the art" classrooms.

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frogfuzion
EdTech right now appears to be the wild west with a lot of startups/VC now
chasing around dollars of typically uninformed and naive school district
officials who will throw the budget towards any shiny new toy or teachers who
will sign up for any cool freemium service.

All of this experimentation is often occurring with ANY sort of cost-benefit
analysis or performance benchmarking.

On top of that it experimentation on -- human children!

~~~
psychometry
Yeah let's just keep doing things the way we've always done them!

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frogfuzion
I'm not arguing against change. Im arguing against change without
accountability and performance metrics. This is what happens now in most
cases. Tax payers are then left to guess if their indirect investments in
technology are worth it.

I'm arguing against tech change blindly initiated by educrats who are easily
suckered by sales pitches at conferences. This is also what is happening now
with such a low barrier of entry to edtech market.

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tracker1
I'm pretty sure there are laws regarding tracking people in the U.S. under the
age of 13 without parental consent...

Data really should be anonymized behind a token from a school provided OAuth2
login server... actually tracking student information in the applications
shouldn't happen in an identifiable way to said application. Unfortunately
many IT jobs in government pay less than half of what a corporate position
will.

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rodgerd
> I'm pretty sure there are laws regarding tracking people in the U.S. under
> the age of 13 without parental consent...

That might be great in the US (although US privacy laws are generally pretty
shithouse compared to Europe, for example), but there's also a huge push of
these products into overseas markets with little to no sign that there's any
adherence to local laws.)

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fnordfnordfnord
It was only about ten years ago that it was still considered an acceptable
practice to require college students to write their SSN on every assignment
and every other bit of paperwork they exchanged with the college. Things are
getting better, just maybe not fast enough.

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ForHackernews
YCombinator's own Clever is in this space. I'd be interested to hear what
safeguards they have in place.

