GoGuardian: asking for parent support to advocate to the BOE

[Anonymous]

OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

Agree but until this actually happens, MCPS needs a software to protect kids. You can’t just give kids laptops and wash your hands of any responsibility. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. MCPS doesn’t listen to teachers (and rarely even parents it feels like). We need something like go guardian in place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

Due to the budget freeze, there is no paper available in schools (and nothing more can be ordered for the remainder of this year). Teachers are buying and bringing in their own copy paper.

[Anonymous]

I’m a parent of a child at TPMS. If teachers are using Go Guardian then why have I gotten emails from them complaining that my child is playing games on the chromebook during instruction time? Is go guardian working or are these teachers not using it? I suggest they take away the chromebook and give my child pencil and paper.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

MCPS is literally in a budget freeze. And the budget was so small to begin with for instructional funds. If I don’t have money to buy textbooks for my classes, what else am I supposed to do? I don’t have the planning time to create my own instructional materials from scratch and I certainly won’t purchase my own copy paper to print it for students. Have you tried getting a middle schooler to use a pencil recently? If they have to write more than their name they cry about how their hand hurts. There are so many problems in this system and it isn’t as easy as just taking away devices

[Anonymous]

I am a heavy GoGuardian user. The main reason is that whatever vender MCPS uses for web filtering does a pisspoor job of blacklisting or whitelisting websites. So, teachers have to resort to Gogaurdian to keep students on task.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

Even though I do think there’s a valid argument to made about the lack of balance in tech use, we are not going to ban it completely, nor should we, so this is not a valid solution to the issue raised by OP and other teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a parent of a child at TPMS. If teachers are using Go Guardian then why have I gotten emails from them complaining that my child is playing games on the chromebook during instruction time? Is go guardian working or are these teachers not using it? I suggest they take away the chromebook and give my child pencil and paper.

Go Guardian is not fail-safe. It might be, if the internet was a non-dynamic environment. Your student's experience indicates a need for Go Guardian.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP I think you and all of the other MCPS teachers should stop relying on electronics so much. The pandemic is over. You know what would 100% keep kids from going off task and playing video games? Not working on a laptop all day; having actual textbooks and pieces of paper to write on and then you teachers could go back to grading by hand.

Even though I do think there’s a valid argument to made about the lack of balance in tech use, we are not going to ban it completely, nor should we, so this is not a valid solution to the issue raised by OP and other teachers.

But it would reduce the need for things like GoGuardian, potentially to levels where it wouldn't be worthwhile to keep them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for going to this effort on behalf of an important tool that is critical to student success.

I don't know that I believed the metrics provided by the school district saying teachers didn't use GoGuardian much. Admin lies to the BOE.

They do, and they've demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to lie to the BoE. But they don't want to get caught in a lie. Lying about usage figures is dangerous in that respect. There's a clear, quantitative answer, recorded in a third-party system. Sure, they can make up data when they present to the BoE, but they better hope that no one on the inside leaks the real figures.

This would be a strange thing to lie about.

CO is looking at everything at the school level to cut. I hope the board asks for third party evidence. Because otherwise, I would not assume CO is being honest with the numbers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a parent of a child at TPMS. If teachers are using Go Guardian then why have I gotten emails from them complaining that my child is playing games on the chromebook during instruction time? Is go guardian working or are these teachers not using it? I suggest they take away the chromebook and give my child pencil and paper.

My presumption is they know this because of GoGuardian. If they didn’t have it, they would not know that kids were trying to play video games.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a parent of a child at TPMS. If teachers are using Go Guardian then why have I gotten emails from them complaining that my child is playing games on the chromebook during instruction time? Is go guardian working or are these teachers not using it? I suggest they take away the chromebook and give my child pencil and paper.

Gogaurdian doesn’t automatically block gaming websites unless teachers create a block list. The trouble is that kids know endless ways around block lists and many know how to disable Gogaurdian by connecting to a hotspot on a phone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a parent of a child at TPMS. If teachers are using Go Guardian then why have I gotten emails from them complaining that my child is playing games on the chromebook during instruction time? Is go guardian working or are these teachers not using it? I suggest they take away the chromebook and give my child pencil and paper.

OMG, not pencil and paper technology! They might play games like tic-tac-toe or hangman!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for going to this effort on behalf of an important tool that is critical to student success.

I don't know that I believed the metrics provided by the school district saying teachers didn't use GoGuardian much. Admin lies to the BOE.

They do, and they've demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to lie to the BoE. But they don't want to get caught in a lie. Lying about usage figures is dangerous in that respect. There's a clear, quantitative answer, recorded in a third-party system. Sure, they can make up data when they present to the BoE, but they better hope that no one on the inside leaks the real figures.

This would be a strange thing to lie about.

CO is looking at everything at the school level to cut. I hope the board asks for third party evidence. Because otherwise, I would not assume CO is being honest with the numbers.

The place to start cutting is the CO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for going to this effort on behalf of an important tool that is critical to student success.

I don't know that I believed the metrics provided by the school district saying teachers didn't use GoGuardian much. Admin lies to the BOE.

They do, and they've demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to lie to the BoE. But they don't want to get caught in a lie. Lying about usage figures is dangerous in that respect. There's a clear, quantitative answer, recorded in a third-party system. Sure, they can make up data when they present to the BoE, but they better hope that no one on the inside leaks the real figures.

This would be a strange thing to lie about.

CO is looking at everything at the school level to cut. I hope the board asks for third party evidence. Because otherwise, I would not assume CO is being honest with the numbers.

The place to start cutting is the CO.

YES!!