As a teacher, there are lots of reasons I’d like kids to have hall passes, so I guess I’ll play the part of devil’s advocate, here: If I’m responsible for the safety, learning, and emotional well-being of your kid, and several hundred other kids whose frontal lobes are still far from developed and vulnerable to unwise impulses, there are behaviors I’d like to discourage. I can’t think of a single reason teachers would want to use a technology like this except to say “yeah, the bathroom trash caught fire at 12:20, when Markey Mark was out of Mrs. Doubtfire’s class.” Are there other reasons it shouldn’t be used, though? Probably… But for this one, I’d like to say the underlying reason isn’t for spying as much as for liability and (uggh…) safety, like knowing a kid had to go to the bathroom when the fire alarm went off and the FD is wondering if they need to send in someone to find them.
Maybe I just work with well-intentioned people. Maybe I am one. I have seen kids more accountable for their actions when I use a sign-out sheet than not. I won’t advocate any tech that puts kids names on a cloud or otherwise off-site network, though. It feels very different from the kind of privacy invasion a corpo or gov’t agency might abuse. Maybe one of you comrades can help pin down why, though.
As a teacher, there are lots of reasons I’d like kids to have hall passes, so I guess I’ll play the part of devil’s advocate, here: If I’m responsible for the safety, learning, and emotional well-being of your kid, and several hundred other kids whose frontal lobes are still far from developed and vulnerable to unwise impulses, there are behaviors I’d like to discourage. I can’t think of a single reason teachers would want to use a technology like this except to say “yeah, the bathroom trash caught fire at 12:20, when Markey Mark was out of Mrs. Doubtfire’s class.” Are there other reasons it shouldn’t be used, though? Probably… But for this one, I’d like to say the underlying reason isn’t for spying as much as for liability and (uggh…) safety, like knowing a kid had to go to the bathroom when the fire alarm went off and the FD is wondering if they need to send in someone to find them. Maybe I just work with well-intentioned people. Maybe I am one. I have seen kids more accountable for their actions when I use a sign-out sheet than not. I won’t advocate any tech that puts kids names on a cloud or otherwise off-site network, though. It feels very different from the kind of privacy invasion a corpo or gov’t agency might abuse. Maybe one of you comrades can help pin down why, though.