As educators around the country look toward mobile and internet applications to enhance student learning, new privacy concerns are beginning to surface. These student information security woes are often beyond the reach of the IT administrators, and instead put into the hands of teachers who may unintentionally cause sensitive data to be released with as little as a simple app sign-up. Unlike many of the historic applications used by school systems in the past, today’s apps circumvent federal privacy regulations by providing educational tools to teachers from third-party platforms that are often notvetted by IT administrators in advance.
Now more than ever, it is up to educators and their tech departments to screen apps for potential privacy violations before handing them off to students. Although it may seem like a laborious task to dig through privacy policies for each and every app for potential security loopholes, here are three tips on how to evaluate and choose more secure student applications:
1. Collaborate to Develop App Guidelines
In their process to find the ideal application to complement course material, teachers may go through a number of different apps before finding the best fit for their class. In order to streamline the process, a school’s IT department and leadership should collaborate with teachers to determine which general features they will or will not permit. This might include automatically weeding out applications that track students using their device’s GPS or sell their usage data to third parties. In this collaboration process, it is critical to strike the right balance of learning potential and information privacy. It may be beneficial for the involved parties to create a full IT Advisory Committee to set these standards.
2. Ask the Parents
To parents, keeping their children safe online is critical - and often overlooked when it comes to school-related activities. Educational tools are no longer restricted to school and allow for a greater level of freedom for students to learn course materials at home - although sometimes at the cost of their privacy. According to the Consortium of School Networking, it is essential that parents are familiar and comfortable with the terms of use given by educational apps, and are ultimately given a voice in whether or not to use the application for their child’s education.
3. The Shorter, the Better
When it comes to protecting student privacy, beware of miles-long application privacy policies. Although it may be tempting to skim through the “Use of Information” section and assume that an application geared towards underage students would know better than to harvest their information, this is unfortunately not always the case. Always read through the entirety of the application privacy policy - if it is simply too long or convoluted to read, that itself is a red flag.
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