X-rated intrusion prompts security changes
Eighth-grader who crashed online class suspended; teachers to cut chat options
Teachers working in the Albany City School District are getting a crash course on virtual classroom security after an eighth grader at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School disrupted a 7th-grade lesson at North Albany and shared X-rated content with the students.
The student, who displayed the homepage of a pornographic website for 10 to 15 seconds, has been suspended for five days for violating the district’s code of conduct, Albany spokesman Ron Lesko said.
Teachers are being reminded to reject “knocks” from external email accounts and will brush up on disabling chat and screen sharing functions during a professional development session this week, Lesko said.
“There are still many questions that remain unanswered about teaching and learning in the virtual environment,” he said.
The first week of online classes at the Albany district began on Sept. 14. Students in grades K-12 logged on at home for half days while teachers streamed lessons directly from empty classrooms. Full-day online and in-person classes will begin next week.
There were other quirks in the first week. Teens had apparently shared Google Meet links with each other and popped into remote lessons to make inappropriate gestures or comments or just to say “hi.”
In the younger grades, teachers struggled to manage large online classes filled with parents piping up with their own questions.
David King, whose daughter Asha attends Pine Hills Elementary School, said the firstgrader has become more computer proficient since classes went online last year.
But in the first week, his daughter’s virtual classroom was frequently disrupted by parents saying things like, “I wasn’t paying attention” and “I went to the bathroom and now I don’t see what we’re working on.”
Educators “clearly have a destination in mind and I really appreciate all the breaks they include, breathing exercises, dance time, etc.,” he said. “It’s just going to be a lot of time spent on that and technology and not a ton of time learning.”
Google Meet has rolled out several teacher controls in recent months. The virtual classroom has been visually streamlined with new hand-raising and whiteboard features. Teachers can now mute all, disable chat, lock the presentation screen, block anonymous knocks, and have more control over when the meeting starts and ends.
The app will soon feature new backgrounds, like blurred backgrounds to give students and teachers more privacy.
The incident at North Albany raises questions about how schools will conduct student discipline during COVID-19. In pre-pandemic times, districts were required to provide suspended students with at least two hours of tutoring daily.
Lesko said the district is “still determining” how to do that in a virtual setting.