Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It came to my attention that young ES kids are using Google Drive to “text” each other during the school day (via a shared Google doc), make screencast recordings, recordings of themselves, etc. My DC is in lower elementary school. I was really shocked to find this on their Drive. DC is otherwise a good student. Parents, I recommend you taking a peek there to see what may be happening during the school day. Don’t think the teacher has any control or oversight over this and it’s a big blind spot.

Um...hello like where have you been. One quarter of the school year is done

Kid only started doing it in the past few weeks.

It's sad that it's an ES issue now. I knew it was a problem with the MS and HS students, but it's just another reason to wait longer to stick kids on Chromebooks all day.

My child is 15 and as soon as they were handed chromebooks in the before times, she and her friends did this. It was an instantaneous issue.

And now in high school... it's NOT an issue. Nobody uses a shared doc to distract themselves in class! Youtube is available because a lot of courses need Youtube access, but if the teacher decides, they can shut off any and all external websites for the duration of their class. There's a special software teachers use for this. Teachers can see, if they wish, anything a student is doing on their chromebook.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS is aware of this but does nothing about it.

Yep- they don’t care! At all

And the tech dept doesn’t listen to the staff in the actual schools who have had to deal with/support following issues related to this.

Anonymous wrote:MCPS is aware of this but does nothing about it.

Yep- they don’t care! At all

Google Slides is another big place for this; there are entire closed social networks there.

I require both of my MS kids to log into my phone with their MCPS passwords. Then I get notified any time there's action in their accounts. If my access goes because their passwords changed, they have to log me back in. I can "be" them almost anywhere in MCPS right from my phone.

OP here. Thank you very much for sharing this survey.

There is a survey happening right now on Chromebook usage

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRtklHc1FiBHwfvUFYFrbPC334tqA9mmIvqwbB0TP0u6Tl_A/viewform

Anonymous wrote:Mcps counselor has seen this go very badly. Mcps tech says they can’t do anything about it.

There really isn't. Kids use google docs for assignments. There is no way to tell which are for assignments and which aren't.

The closest thing you could potentially do is lock the share access on docs and not do group assignments.

10 years ago my kid was using google docs for a group assignment. Some kid outside their group somehow got access to my kid's doc and made edits. I saw it happening when DC was working on the doc at home.

Fortunately, I know Google Docs fairly well, so I was able to get the previous version back, and lock that person out.

I have a love/hate relationship with tech, and I work in tech.

Mcps counselor has seen this go very badly. Mcps tech says they can’t do anything about it.

The kids also use Google Docs to share links for games that haven’t been blocked as well as links to access YouTube .

Anonymous wrote:It came to my attention that young ES kids are using Google Drive to “text” each other during the school day (via a shared Google doc), make screencast recordings, recordings of themselves, etc. My DC is in lower elementary school. I was really shocked to find this on their Drive. DC is otherwise a good student. Parents, I recommend you taking a peek there to see what may be happening during the school day. Don’t think the teacher has any control or oversight over this and it’s a big blind spot.

Welcome to 2020 OP. This is an old old tale. They make a copy of the document that they should be working on and then use comments to chat back and forth. When the teacher looks at their screens, it appears that they are doing their work.

Remember when you had to actually write the note on paper and secretly pass it to someone after squishing it into a ball??

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It came to my attention that young ES kids are using Google Drive to “text” each other during the school day (via a shared Google doc), make screencast recordings, recordings of themselves, etc. My DC is in lower elementary school. I was really shocked to find this on their Drive. DC is otherwise a good student. Parents, I recommend you taking a peek there to see what may be happening during the school day. Don’t think the teacher has any control or oversight over this and it’s a big blind spot.

Um...hello like where have you been. One quarter of the school year is done

Kid only started doing it in the past few weeks.

It's sad that it's an ES issue now. I knew it was a problem with the MS and HS students, but it's just another reason to wait longer to stick kids on Chromebooks all day.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I actually think "chatting" with each other via Google Drive is one of the least concerning things kids could be doing with their Chromebooks. The issue is just too much screen time overall -- there should be minimal in elementary school.

During class when they're supposed to be learning, though? I agree, it is not the chatting itself, but it's highly distracting that they have access during school time.

It affects the students negatively but is a quiet activity that doesn't bother the teacher so there is that.

My kid's a HS senior and I remember her telling me she did this in 4th grade. Teachers know but why should they care much? I don't actually see the harm. Apparently they could also find songs somehwere online ( maybe youtube? not sure) and would have shared 'playlists' that were links in google docs and I guess they were allowed to put their earbuds in while reading and such.

Anonymous wrote:I actually think "chatting" with each other via Google Drive is one of the least concerning things kids could be doing with their Chromebooks. The issue is just too much screen time overall -- there should be minimal in elementary school.

During class when they're supposed to be learning, though? I agree, it is not the chatting itself, but it's highly distracting that they have access during school time.