Thursday, June 3, 2010

Acceptable Use Policy at home verses school

So I found out we will have computers for students to check out of the library. We are in current debate of writing a new acceptable use policy for home use. Do you think the at home policy should include more freedom for students?

4 comments:

  1. If a student uses the laptop in an inappropriate way such as cyberbullying, can your school be held responsible since it was done with school property?

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  2. In ET 680 if I remember correctly if it was not done at school then they can't do anything about it. But we never really talked about if it was done on school property if it was a violation.

    I don't think the student should get more freedom, but if you check and they have abused their privileges by going to a site that is blocked at school, you could revoke their signing out abilities for a quarter and then if it happens again they will never get to check out the laptop anymore.

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  3. I am pretty sure anything done with school property is still under school jurisdiction. I am concerned that taking away checkout priviledges only affects a small group of studetns. For example, a lot of students already own a computer but say not PowerPoint. So if they loose their checkout priviledges are we really hurting their day to day computer use. Also if you take away the computers from the students who do not own a computer, then aren't you only increasing the digital divide?

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  4. This is a hard question. On one hand, I think that students need to have access to sites with educational value that are blocked at school. On the other had, we have to make sure that they are not using the computer inappropriately (for example cyberbullying or searching inappropriate websites).

    Is there a way to tell if a student is using the school computer versus a home computer to do inappropriate things?

    I wonder what the policy is for teachers that receive computers from their school systems (like Howard County). Maybe your school could modify a policy for teachers to meet the needs for your student policy.

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