As educational apps continue to rise in popularity in school districts across the country, educational technology administrators find themselves inundated. Just as quickly as IT can clear new applications for use, new ones crop up in classrooms - often without passing an IT review. This is the current state of the freemium application model in education, and it’s one that is creating a perpetual tug of war between teaching staffs and school technology departments.
Educational freemium applications, or apps that are free to download with additional content that can be accessed through purchases, pose a conundrum for faculty. While they can offer teachers an unparalleled ability to teach their students classroom material in an interactive, engaging, and individualized way, these apps can also be security nightmares for IT staffs. A major cause of those nightmares are the terms of agreement that accompany many of these apps and allow third parties, such as advertisers, to collect data on its underaged users, including their contact information and test scores. As a result, many school IT departments have ramped up on their efforts to better moderate these applications - with mixed results.
To complicate the situation even further, some teachers circumvent IT altogether and use unapproved apps in their classrooms. The reasons for this circumvention vary - some teachers don’t know an approval process exists, some feel like that process takes too long, while others simply think they know better than IT which technologies should be used in the classroom.
These rogue teachers end up creating potential vulnerabilities in the school system’s infrastructure; and if the IT staff doesn’t know about an app that’s in use, it certainly can’t secure that app and all who are using it.
While automated IAM management software can certainly help, it can’t do much good if it’s being left out of the process. Therefore, the best first step is a non technology-driven one - communication. It sounds quite basic, but a good flow of communication between the IT staff and teaching faculty can help to better secure the school’s infrastructure, protecting children’s identities and improving teachers’ abilities to help students learn.
As an IT department, if you work with teachers to develop an easy, simple and timely way for IT to approve classroom apps, along with rationale of why it’s necessary to have an approval process, you’ll have an easier time securing those apps. You’ll also have teachers who may be more willing to work with you because they know they were a part of the process and decision.
Earlier this year, we discussed the value of IT Audit Committees in education. The creation of an approval model for classroom apps would be a great project for a group like that. If you’re interested in learning more about how an IT Audit Committee would work, download our free guidebook.
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