Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was included as a cut in the superintendent's recommended operating budget. MCPS said only 3000 out of 14000 teachers used it at least once recently.

Yeah. That 3,000 out of 14,000 stat is pretty hard to justify paying for the full license for all teachers.

It doesn’t speak to how MCPS rolled it out tho, which likely led to those low adoption numbers.

Nope. Site blockers aren’t blocking translation pages or sites with calculators,etc,etc,etc. the solution is to cut central office bloat and keep things that are actually useful. Remind is not useful. At all. GoGuardian is.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was included as a cut in the superintendent's recommended operating budget. MCPS said only 3000 out of 14000 teachers used it at least once recently.

Yeah. That 3,000 out of 14,000 stat is pretty hard to justify paying for the full license for all teachers.

It doesn’t speak to how MCPS rolled it out tho, which likely led to those low adoption numbers.

+1 why the heck are only 3000 out of 14K using it?

DD, sophomore, told me that their chromebooks have it.

Yes, they have it. But it isn't doing anything if the teachers aren't using it.

yes, but why aren't they using it?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They said 6,000 teachers have used it this year, with 3,000 using it in the last month (I'm wondering if that time period includes the holidays and snow days). And they said that most of the use is concentrated at a handful of secondary schools. They propose replacing it with training on better classroom management strategies so that teachers can "monitor technology without the use of technology".

They did not elaborate on that, but I would love to know how you can monitor technology without technology. Do they mean walking around the classrooms? You can close tab super quick as soon as you see the teacher moving.

I'm a parent, not a teacher, but even I found that line to be incredibly condescending. "Classroom management" is basically a code word for bad/ineffective teaching.

That being said, even if the teachers who rely on GoGuardian have poor classroom management skills, I don't trust anyone in CO to teach them how to do better. So this isn't much of a solution.

Theres not much to learn. You log into GoGuardian. Select the class you want to monitor. Hit start class. I taught myself in about 3 minutes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was included as a cut in the superintendent's recommended operating budget. MCPS said only 3000 out of 14000 teachers used it at least once recently.

Yeah. That 3,000 out of 14,000 stat is pretty hard to justify paying for the full license for all teachers.

It doesn’t speak to how MCPS rolled it out tho, which likely led to those low adoption numbers.

You actually believe MCPS is being truthful about this? This is McKnights recommendation for chrissake.

What's hilarious about the decision to remove GoGuardian is that McKnight cited a full implementation of GoGuardian this month as a defense for her compliance with DCI's chaos and dysfunction.

So how will that work once they defund and remove GoGuardian from MCPS?

Anonymous wrote:I told my 8th and 10th graders this morning that GoGuardian might go away and they were incredulous. They said that it's not needed all the time, but teachers definitely use it when they are doing online tests (e.g., in Spanish class to make sure that nobody has Google Translate open) or other online work, and that some teachers use it a lot.

+1 My 8th grader in particular. This will be big news for the middle schoolers.

I think the 3000 out of 14000 is an unfair comparison. Are PEP and PreK teachers using it? No. But secondary teachers certainly are, and many upper grade ES teachers. I teach 4th and I can't cruise the classroom and monitor every student's screen. Site blockers are useless imo. Some of the blocked sites (like YouTube) have useful course when monitored, and there are plenty of off-task and inappropriate places kids can go on normal sites. I've caught students on Google shopping looking at bras. They create shared documents in Drive and use them as chatting pages.

If anything this tells me that schools need to make sure teachers are fluent with how to use it and strongly encouraged to do so. It's a great tool when implemented. And honestly now that students know what it is and have seen it used to bust a few kids, I really DON'T need to use anymore. At this point in the year, most of my spontaneous checks are showing students exactly where they should be.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Contact Board of Education: boe@mcpsmd.org

They're too busy scapegoating McK to worry about this kind of thing.

Your girl is on her way out. Get used to it and get over it. She blew it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They said 6,000 teachers have used it this year, with 3,000 using it in the last month (I'm wondering if that time period includes the holidays and snow days). And they said that most of the use is concentrated at a handful of secondary schools. They propose replacing it with training on better classroom management strategies so that teachers can "monitor technology without the use of technology".

They did not elaborate on that, but I would love to know how you can monitor technology without technology. Do they mean walking around the classrooms? You can close tab super quick as soon as you see the teacher moving.

I'm a parent, not a teacher, but even I found that line to be incredibly condescending. "Classroom management" is basically a code word for bad/ineffective teaching.

That being said, even if the teachers who rely on GoGuardian have poor classroom management skills, I don't trust anyone in CO to teach them how to do better. So this isn't much of a solution.

Anonymous wrote:Contact Board of Education: boe@mcpsmd.org

They're too busy scapegoating McK to worry about this kind of thing.

Anonymous wrote:Contact Board of Education: boe@mcpsmd.org

Yes, we should demand that schools be more like kid prisons with super-GoGuardian, barbed wire and armed SROs.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They said 6,000 teachers have used it this year, with 3,000 using it in the last month (I'm wondering if that time period includes the holidays and snow days). And they said that most of the use is concentrated at a handful of secondary schools. They propose replacing it with training on better classroom management strategies so that teachers can "monitor technology without the use of technology".

They did not elaborate on that, but I would love to know how you can monitor technology without technology. Do they mean walking around the classrooms? You can close tab super quick as soon as you see the teacher moving.

Snitches?

Contact Board of Education: boe@mcpsmd.org

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was included as a cut in the superintendent's recommended operating budget. MCPS said only 3000 out of 14000 teachers used it at least once recently.

Yeah. That 3,000 out of 14,000 stat is pretty hard to justify paying for the full license for all teachers.

It doesn’t speak to how MCPS rolled it out tho, which likely led to those low adoption numbers.

Keep in mind site licenses are negotiated understanding that adoption may be limited. A la carte and school-based licenses would be much expensive.

Maybe they could license it just for secondary schools' use but not elementary?

They probably could, but it isn't going to be that much cheaper if MCPS is just turning on licenses for basically the same schools that used it before.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was included as a cut in the superintendent's recommended operating budget. MCPS said only 3000 out of 14000 teachers used it at least once recently.

Yeah. That 3,000 out of 14,000 stat is pretty hard to justify paying for the full license for all teachers.

It doesn’t speak to how MCPS rolled it out tho, which likely led to those low adoption numbers.

3000 out of 14000 is a really low percentage when you could install something less expensive just for site blocking and let it be done by the enterprise system in IT.

If teachers need or want it to remain for certain grades now is the time to notify the BOE and their Admin to speak up.

I'm sure they do network/DNS blocking, but that is very, very limited compared to endpoint controls.