On GoGuardian and invasion of student privacy

Teacher here.

I use GoGuardian on a regular basis.

I'll qualify what I'm about to say with the lead-in that I think student privacy is a major issue that needs to be dealt with. It sits right alongside (underneath?) broad digital privacy protections in general. People who know me here on Tildes know that I'm very protective of my own personal privacy, and I wish I lived in a country that made deliberate and meaningful efforts to support me in that. The way I feel about myself personally goes quadruple for my students, who are only kids and are much more vulnerable given that they've never lived in a world that hasn't tracked them.

With that said, I don't think this article is particularly helpful. In fact, I think it's counterproductive. It feels to me like it's a casualty of the now omnipresent need for internet content to shallowly stoke outrage rather than commit to more nuanced, in-depth analysis. The "Red Flag Quiz" they made and headings like "Replacing Social Workers with Big Brother" feel like they're made more for virality than for accurately depicting the actual landscape on which platforms like GoGuardian live.

For one, it's clear that the EFF didn't talk to any teachers before writing this. GoGuardian is exclusively characterized as a method of surveillance rather than a legitimate tool. Furthermore, it gets some basic information about GoGuardian just plain wrong. For example: what it calls "Scenes" are actually called "Sessions". A "Scene" is something you can apply within a "Session", so it's an easy mistake to make, but it feels really sloppy to me. Imagine reading an article complaining about, say, Windows, but the author kept mistakenly calling it "Microsoft Explorer". Their complaints would lose a lot of credibility.

My school started using GoGuardian, like so many other schools did, when the COVID pandemic hit. We had used it a bit in very limited contexts prior to the pandemic, but it didn't become an everyday, household name until schools shut down and all of our classes shifted online.

The reason for getting GoGuardian was not because we suddenly wanted to surveil our students from their homes. The reason for getting GoGuardian was because it would allow us to better instruct students from their homes.

To explain why, I have to talk a bit about modern teaching. I imagine many of us here, especially the older folks, have an image of teaching as someone sitting at a desk or standing in front of a class. That teacher talks to the class, conveys information, the students listen and write things down, and that's pretty much it.

This is not the case in modern education, particularly in the United States.

In my role as a teacher, I'm rarely lecturing or giving whole-class instruction. After I do, I'm not sitting at my desk for the rest of the period. I'm walking around the room, assessing students' progress and understanding, checking in with individual students, identifying pain points or misunderstandings with the material, answering questions, encouraging and directing peer collaboration, etc. It's continual, ongoing, individualized support, conferencing, and, yes, monitoring.

On a brief walk around my classroom, I'm not idly strolling -- I'm actively scanning the papers of the students in front of me:

• Did he correctly balance that chemical equation?
• What meaning did she find in the author's imagery on lines 19 to 20?
• Did that student who used the wrong trig identity yesterday learn to fix their mistakes today?

I'm also continually acting on those in-the-moment observations, integrating them with my knowledge of the students, their abilities, and their work habits, and judging how best to intervene or support them if needed. One student might like direct pointers; another might prefer to work with a peer to clear up a misunderstanding. One student might be able to bounce back from an error, while another might be derailed by it.

Gone are the days of waiting until the test at the end of the unit to know if a student knows how to perform certain skills. How and what I do is continually informed by what's happening in the classroom on a moment-to-moment basis, with misconceptions and supports deployed almost instantaneously. At the end of any given class, I can pretty accurately tell you who learned what and who didn't. I can also identify areas of instruction for the following day: common misconceptions, edge cases, new or novel situations to integrate what they've learned, etc.

I know we have a lot of software developers here, and it's not an exact metaphorical fit, but modern teaching looks a lot more like the agile model of project management than the waterfall one.

Anyway, this has been the norm of what I do for as long as I've been in this career. It's so normal I don't even realize I'm doing it most of the time. It's second nature -- the life-sustaining oxygen in the room I'm not even aware that I'm breathing.

So then, something big happens: COVID hits.

And schools shut down.

Classrooms are empty. Kids are now tasked with learning from home.

What this means for me is that I no longer have a classroom to walk around in. The oxygen of my career -- evaluating and supporting student learning in the moment -- is suddenly gone.

I can't observe the papers on their desks because they're not at their desks. I can't check in on what they're doing in my class because they're literally not in my class. What I can do is broadcast myself via video to them, sitting at home. I can talk them through a lesson, showing them how to do something new. I can then let them try, giving them some practice problems and I... what? Sit there blankly staring at my webcam?

Am I back to the waterfall, chalk-and-talk model of teaching? Do I wait three weeks for the unit test to know if they've learned something?

GoGuardian was a useful tool during the pandemic because it replicated the in-person environment I was used to on the backdrop of an all-virtual distance learning setup. It let me see what my students were doing, in the moment. I could assign them work on a digital plaform, and then I could watch them do it, see their process, and address their misunderstandings on the fly.

It gave me my oxygen back.

GoGuardian has a built in chat feature. I used that constantly to message students individually, while they were working, helping them figure out new concepts and identify mistakes. I could use GoGuardian to video chat with groups of students, so I'd pull three or four kids who weren't getting it into their own private small group live help session. GoGuardian became my eyes for my students' work during COVID, as well as the way I could individually support them as they worked. It would have been impossible for me to see what they were doing and support them as individuals otherwise (Google Meet for example, which I also used regularly, launched with only global chat, meaning all messages could be read by everyone in a meeting, for example -- I hopefully don't need to explain how terrible this would be for a virtual classroom setting).

Now that we're out of COVID, I don't use GoGuardian as much. I'd much rather walk around my classroom and see things with my own eyes and have in-person conversations than digital chat-based ones, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still great for certain circumstances. Written assignments, in particular, are difficult to "scan" easily from a distance due to handwriting issues and the fact that if I stand over a student's shoulder to read their writing for a minute, it's excruciating for both me and that student.

If I pop on a GoGuardian session and have the students type their responses on their computers, however, it's trivial for me to bounce from screen to screen and check in on their progress. It is stunningly more efficient and less awkward than circulating the classroom.

Another teacher I work with runs our after-school virtual homework support program. Students can log in from home to ask questions and get help with their homework on any given night. She uses GoGuardian for that extensively. Helping the kids out would be nearly impossible without it.

I suppose you could distill down what we are doing to be the "surveillance" of students, but that characterization feels wrong to me because it implies a maliciousness that isn't really there, as well as a complete lack of appreciation for the genuine richness enabled by the practice. Doing what I do makes me a better teacher and helps my students learn better. I wouldn't be nearly as effective at what I did if I weren't continually "gathering data" by "monitoring" my students as they worked.

This is why I balk at the article's suggestion that GoGuardian is merely a surveillance platform. It was genuinely invaluable during the pandemic shutdowns, and it remains valuable today, though it's less essential than it was.

This is to say nothing of the other things it offers, particularly site blocking. @Wolf_359 discusses it in their comment here, but handing kids a device with unfettered access to the internet and expecting them to remain focused and on-task through sheer willpower is not developmentally appropriate.

I can't speak in detail to the higher-level GoGuardian functions like Beacon that are brought up. These are quite literally "above" me in that I don't have access to them. It's my understanding that these are "always on" for student devices, which is very different from what I get. This article makes it sound like teachers are willingly putting students in panopticons, but that's not the case. The only way I get information on my students is by choosing to open a Session during which I can see their screens, view their open tabs, chat with them, and see a timeline of their active tabs. When the Session closes, that data stream stops for me, and I have no access to anything of theirs. I am only provided with data when I actively initiate it, and I don't get any content warnings from that view. Those, from Beacon, only go to administrators and counselors (as far as I know).

When I do open a Session, students are notified on their devices that there's an active GoGuardian session, so they are aware that a teacher is monitoring them. If I were to turn on a Session outside of school hours, I'd likely see nothing because I only get information if the student's Chromebook is on and active (and with how few of my students do homework, I'm assuming that their laptops don't open again until the moment they walk back in the school's doors the next morning).

The other big omission this article makes is that GoGuardian tracks student behavior on school devices. When the article says that administrators "have nearly unfettered access to huge amounts of data about students, including browsing histories, documents, videos, app and extension data, and content filtering and alerts", it makes it sound like the entire student's digital life is up for view. The truth is that GoGuardian isn't showing me what they looked up on their phones or their home computers -- it's showing only what they looked up on their school-issued Chromebooks.

Granted, this is still a privacy concern, especially because kids, developmentally, aren't in a place where they can fully separate out their "work" and "personal" selves, but it's not nearly as invasive as it sounds either. I think we all acknowledge (and are generally quite comfortable with) the expectation that our work devices are not ours and that we aren't guaranteed privacy on them. I actively talk with my students about exactly this. Their Chromebooks are not their hardware; they're not on their own network; their purpose is not for personal use. I talk about how I don't do any personal stuff on my work laptop and how the IT department for our district can see everything I do including view my search history and read my emails. I tell them how I limit my personal stuff to my personal devices, and I don't put those on my school's network.

And then I talk with them about how, even on their personal devices, they aren't getting privacy anyway because Google and Facebook and Snapchat are tracking everything they do too. This is where my students stop listening because I sound like an old man quite literally yelling at the cloud and also the quickest way to for me to sound out of touch is to make TikTok sound like its anything but the best, most exciting thing in the world.

Anyway, I've said a lot, but the article feels fear-mongery to me in a bad way. My biggest problem is that I feel like it commits pretty big lies of omission about what GoGuardian actually does. I also feel like its complaints come across more as provocations rather than from a place of legitimate concern. As a beleaguered teacher, I’ve read way too many articles rabble rousing about problems with education and very few that seem interested in genuinely solving them or even diving below the surface to attempt to explain why those issues came about in the first place. It gets tiring being an endless political and social football. We’re starving for solutions in education but people only seem to write about us when they want to get people mad.

I'm someone who wants better privacy protection for everyone, students especially, but this article leaves me with no other takeaways on that front than "be mad at GoGuardian". That doesn't sit right with me, because, as a teacher, I believe it is a legitimately useful educational tool.