This is part of an article I wrote for BusyMommyMedia.com:
Technology has quickly become a staple in our educational systems. You would have a hard time finding a classroom in any school across the US that does not have a computer either in each classroom or a computer lab for students to access, regardless if it is high school or elementary. Schools are even handing out laptops and netbooks to their students and the hardbound textbooks are becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs. But is all of this a good thing?
We can spend hours and hours debating the relevancy and ramifications of tech in our classrooms, but the questions will still remain! And, thanks to one school district, even more questions are hitting the surface — this time about students’ rights and privacy!
Last week a story broke about a school district in Philadelphia reportedly spying on high school students via the built-in cameras on their school-provided laptops while the students had the laptops at home!
The alleged spying was discovered when the school disciplined a student for “improper behavior in his home.” As evidence the Vice Principal showed a photo of the student in his home taken by the school-provided laptop webcam. Students had complained to the school tech department that the camera light on his MacBook would randomly turn on (the little green light next to the webcam shows when the built in webcam has been activated), but the IT department dismissed the problem saying that programs accessing the camera must have been in use or that it was a glitch.
