Student antics with cell phones, iPods means heartburn for school IT staff

Students love their iPods, cell phones and social-networking sites, but school IT managers are discovering that student misbehavior with technology is adding to their network security challenges. 

Take the student shenanigans that have been observed over time at Collinsville Illinois Unit School District #10, for example, which has about 6,300 students in K-12 classrooms connected via the state-run network out to the Internet. In antics that give school staff heartburn, students have captured videos of teachers and put them on the Web, used iPods to prerecord answers to tests and have made what administrators have to admit are successful efforts to bypass a filter put in place to block restricted Web sites.

“High school students find ways to go around the firewall,” acknowledges Mike Kunz, district network manager at Collinsville Illinois Community Unit School District #10.

Although the Illinois school district updates its list of blocked sites every hour, the most tech-savvy kids on desktop computers and other devices find a way out by logging into specialized servers that redirect traffic to forbidden sites. “There isn’t an easy way to fight that,” he adds. "It keeps changing. You have to try and continually block the sites.”

The school’s official acceptable-user policy spells out that access to third-party e-mail, chat rooms and social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, are off limits to students. One reason for putting social networking sites off limits, says Susan Homes, information systems director at School District #10, is that a few years ago a student went missing after communicating with an adult via one of the social-networking sites.

While a police review of school logs didn’t indicate the student’s online dialog commenced on the school’s network, the Illinois school district, under advice of attorneys, decided the prudent approach would be to restrict student access to social sites.

The wave of opinion against student use of social-networking sites during school time is reflected in state legislation related to school Internet safety now under discussion on the House side of the Illinois General Assembly, Homes says.

“There is a bill to block social-networking sites,” says Homes, who says she hopes the legislation undergoes further refinement to be more definitive about what schools might be expected to do. Some of the language in the House bill is so broad it could imply that schools had an obligation to teach kindergarten students about virus and phishing, she notes.
Cell phones with their texting, video and Internet capability these days are another hot topic in school security.

“Almost every student has a cell phone and Internet access,” says Homes. “We can’t control students uploading text.”

The school cell-phone policy allows cell phones on school grounds, with some restrictions on use. Policy also dictates that “unless you have the parent’s permission, you can’t read what the student text-messaged,” Homes says.

Students are not allowed to use cell phones during class time, but violations of this have been a source of disciplinary actions, she points out. One school had to cope with the ruckus caused by a student making an audio/video recording of a substitute teacher in class and uploading it to a social-networking site.