Chromebook controversy
Parents concerned about handout of school laptops
WATERLOO REGION — When Tabitha Boronka, 13, started high school this week, the public school board handed the Grade 9 student a $330 laptop she can use to explore everything, anywhere.
Her mother Irina Boronka is displeased. “They can’t just give out unfiltered internet to 13-year-old kids that they can access at any time,” she said.
“Every parent should be concerned about stuff like pornography, gambling, meeting people there, being exploited, all kinds of inappropriate things that I think they should not have any access to at all.”
Inside schools, network filters prevent Tabitha and other students from using board-owned computers to access millions of inappropriate sites including pornography, gambling and gaming. Outside schools, Tabitha and others can freely surf the web by connecting their board computers to unfiltered Wi-Fi.
This seems wrong to Boronka, a mother of eight who believes the job she shares with the school board is to “lock up the alcohol, lock up the hazardous chemicals, and lock up the Playboy magazines” because children are curious and lack self-control.
The Waterloo Region District School Board has given computers called Chromebooks to 10,000 students in a rollout that will eventually provide every high school student with a device.
Students carry the computers home and are to keep them all through high school. The devices connect online to Google’s web-based education software. The board says this will help build stronger students.
Boronka and other parents are demanding the board install technology to restrict website access wherever students take their Chromebooks. Boronka says she got no response after raising her concerns at Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School, which her daughters attend.
“We’re aware of other technologies that are available to filter board devices when they’re not on our networks and we have looked into those,” board spokesperson Nick Manning said. “There are limitations to the technology and it’s really not very widespread right now.
“We think it’s most important that we provide (students) with the education to stay safe online, as opposed to going to big expense and investigating a technology that really as yet is relatively unproven and not very widely adopted to filter at the device level.”
The board calls its plan digital citizenship. It includes a code of conduct with penalties for accessing inappropriate websites, ranging from losing computer access to suspension or expulsion. Parents can’t put filtering software on student Chromebooks but they can filter internet access through their home’s Wi-Fi. The Thames Valley District School Board in London, Ont. has done what Boronka is demanding, purchasing software meant to block inappropriate websites wherever a student uses a board-owned Chromebook. The board is testing laptops with 1,700 students ahead of a board-wide rollout and doesn’t want its students freely surfing the web.
“The students may not be under adult supervision while offsite and we don’t want (boardowned) devices to deliberately or accidentally access inappropriate sites,” said Marion Moynihan, a superintendent in charge of information technology.
Certain school boards in Kansas, Texas and Georgia filter the internet wherever their Chromebooks are used. But internet filtering doesn’t always work, parents are typically cautioned. Even inside schools, network filters sometimes fail to block sites as administrators play a cat-and-mouse game with the ever-changing internet.
A school board in Topeka, Kansas, had to turn off its Chromebook filtering off school property. The filters interfered with students completing assignments from home, causing some assignments to be late or lost.
The board warned parents: your kids may now be roaming free online if you aren’t monitoring them. In London, the Thames Valley board completed a public tender to purchase internet filters. It sought technology that works anywhere a student uses a Chromebook.
“We are proceeding because we believe our vendor’s product will function as promised, but we will be carefully monitoring this over the course of the pilot project,” Moynihan said.
Manning prefers education over a technical solution because high school students can always turn to their own devices to freely surf the web, and because the board aims to help students come to grips with the internet they will know as adults. He said the board will monitor filtering technology and hasn’t ruled it out.
“Even if we put device-level filtering on the Chromebooks for example, it would be very easy for (students) to put those aside and use their tablets and their phones to access content that might otherwise be filtered on our networks and on our devices,” he said. “They need to know how to use these things safely.”
Critics see inconsistency, saying the school board should impose the same internet controls outside schools that it feels the need to impose inside schools.
“More and more research is showing that unfettered access to the internet, especially for kids up to their 20s, can be extremely damaging,” said Gary Tomic, a father of five who has raised Chromebook concerns with school trustees. “What I and other parents have been trying to get across to the school board is to wake up and take responsibility.”
Tomic, a computer engineer who works in internet security, sees Chromebooks as useful if properly filtered. Unlike the school board, he sees technical solutions as widely available and affordable.
Tabitha Boronka’s sister Salome, 15, is in Grade 10 and was issued her board-owned laptop a year ago at Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School.
“I like having a Chromebook. It’s useful. It’s convenient,” Salome said. “I do school work. Sometimes I’ll chat with friends. At home I use it for some personal stuff, email and stuff.”
Salome is assigned homework through her computer. She completes it and submits it on the device. She can communicate with classmates about an assignment while they’re doing it. She can email her teacher with questions.
“Sometime ads will pop up that aren’t really appropriate,” she said.
Like her mother Irina, Salome supports filtering her computer wherever she uses it, concerned about what lurks inside the internet. Her parents filter their home Wi-Fi.
“It’s a useful thing for research and for school but it’s also dangerous because if it’s not filtered, anything can come up. Like everything possible,” she said.
“I would say some kids would use (their Chromebook) irresponsibly because they have the whole internet at their fingertips now and because I know the way some people are.”