This past September, my second grader came home from school
very excited. "Mommy!' he joyfully yelled at me, before he'd even taken off his backpack, "can I sign into the Chrome Book and show Cooper a video I saw at school today?"
I was a little taken aback, and I chuckled at his lack of knowledge about the correct terminology. I did, however know what he meant - he wanted to log into his MCPS Google account so he could get into his teacher's Google Classroom - and I was aware the Chrome books were coming to his school; in fact, at Back to School Night, his principal proudly discussed what their plans were for the old, outdated computer lab. Now that each classroom had access to a cart of Chrome Books, the lab could be re-purposed.
But what made me nervous, as I helped him get logged into to his account through Google Chrome on our home computer, was how quickly and easily he could log in and access the inter-webs. At the tender age of 7, he was already a full-fledged Google customer.
In my second full-time job as a high school teacher, we are currently reading
The Crucible and our unit themes are power, oppression, and control. I've taken the opportunity to discuss what Edward Snowden calls the "
architecture of oppression" with my students- truly Orwellian ways in which the federal government has slowly started to build a police state where all of our moves are tracked. In class, we took a look at this image:
http://flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?id=2310693918&url=http%3A%2F%2Fflickrhivemind.net%2FUser%2Fddonar%2FInteresting%3Fsearch_type%3DUser%3Btextinput%3Dddonar%3Bphoto_type%3D250%3Bmethod%3DGET%3Bnoform%3Dt%3Bsort%3DInterestingness%23pic2310693918&user=&flickrurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/24311072@N03/2310693918
and asked some tough questions about how far was too far and what liberties we were willing to give up to keep ourselves safe from terrorism. And yes, the cartoon is silly, my students and I agreed - what would the NSA want with a child's secrets?
This semester, ironically, just as we were reading about the ways in which the Puritans tracked each other's movements and gathered "evidence" against the terrible John Proctor (who doesn't go to church often enough and gasp! plows on Sundays), I was given access to my own classroom set of Chrome Books because a Social Studies teacher uses my classroom. I knew about Google Classroom and have used Google Groups with my AP kids for many years, but I hadn't yet set up this whole virtual classroom world for my students. The reality is that this is where we are - we are living in a digital world, and as both a teacher and mother, I struggle with the idea that a bulk of our personal and professional lives are now lived online and it's making us all that much more vulnerable. Particularly, it is making our children, already so very vulnerable, veritable prey for large corporations, such as Google. And worse perhaps?
In fact, Google is now practically ubiquitous in American classrooms. In the third quarter of 2015,
more than half of all computers purchased by American school systems were Chrome Books, and practically all American school children are using Google software of some kind or another in their schools. In MCPS,
all of our students, even our tiniest babies, our kindergartners, have Google accounts, bought and paid for with your tax dollars.
And for what? Do the benefits outweigh the massive risks? Have we really thought about all of this, and what it might mean for our future? Yes. Chrome Books are cheap. They are easy to use. It's easy to post assignments. Easy for seven-year-olds to log-in to. But with everything in life, it's
never that easy. There are drawbacks to every thing we do, pros and cons. And have we asked ourselves what those drawbacks are? Have we asked whether or not we are willing to risk our children's privacy because of ease?
One such pretty massive drawback, as depicted in that cartoon above, is that Google is tracking our kids' movements online. They insist they are not doing anything dark with this data - just looking at way to improve their software. But how do we know? Can we trust them? They seem to speak out of both sides of their mouths, and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) alleges that only some of the software is protected under educational privacy agreements, such as Gmail and Calendar. But if students are using, say, Google News to conduct research for a school project, because technically
Google News isn't part of the educational platform, then Google
can use that data to track your kids and tailor advertisements to them.
All of this is very, very scary, especially considering that thanks to outdated,
1970's era student privacy laws, schools systems don't even need to ask our permission as parents - as long as they have a contract with the company, they are legally allowed to share your child's information with the company. So the question remains - who are we trusting with our students' data? And, most importantly - can they be trusted?
In
The Crucible, Parris and Danforth continue to insist that the court works if your heart in clean, and that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be afraid. But is this really true? Can we really trust our elected officials, if motivated by money or other external carrots, to keep our best interest at heart? And most importantly, to protect our children's right to privacy? Is targeted advertising really
that dangerous? Or, is it possible that this seemingly innocent data collection can easily become something worse, if it falls into the wrong hands? Or if, God forbid, our government decides that what we're doing isn't something they like?
Ultimately, as parents, it is our job to protect our own children. But it makes our jobs so much more difficult when our school systems, those other people whose job it is to protect our children, are thrusting these programs into our children's educational lives, into their tiny, trusting hands. Maybe they aren't, as they promise, doing anything nefarious with this information. But what if they are?
Can we really take that risk?
