Many of the schools today has adapted to the use of technology to better education and create a simpler means of doing things. At New York State Elementary School, teachers are allowed to use an app that monitors and keeps a record of students to determine if they are good or bad. In Georgia, some schools have changed their cafeteria line letting students pay for their lunches by scanning their hand, and state all over our nation are using social media sites to spread information for students who play sports. Schools are becoming more and more technology based in order to help achieve a better learning experience, but all of the technology used in the schools have allowed for technology companies to gather tons of data of students and have very little restrictions on what they can do with that information. Parents started to speak up and question the privacy and security of their children, concerned that certain information like learning disabilities or family issues will leak out and effect their child's future college or career life. Critics about technology in schools say that the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act isn't keeping up with the digital age because many of the education sites and apps are not covered by the law due to them not being a part of the official institutional student education records. In fact, last year parents voiced their concerned about inBloom, which is a student data warehouse that offered to streamline how educator and apps received students information, and forced them to shut down. Because of this concern over privacy, over one-hundred bills across the nation have been passed in the last year to try and prevent student information from getting out, California being the one that has made the largest leap forward. California passed a law that prohibits education sites, apps, and cloud services from selling or disclosing any sort of personal information they may have received about a student at any grade level. This bill prohibits companies from selling, disclosing, or using students online searches, text messages, photos, voice recording, biometric data, location information, food purchases, political or religious information, digital documentation, and many more things for marking purposes. The purpose for this, is to prohibit companies from using student information without permission. However, it is not fully passed yet. Governor Jerry Brown has not chosen a side concerning this new law, but if he does not say anything by the end of the month, this bill will officially be passed. James P. Steyer says that this bill was issued in order to put parents minds at ease and get them to trust in online learning.
Reflection:
This has always been a concern for me as a student. My parents always warned me about how I need to protect my personal information when it came to the internet or technology in general so being forced to sign up for websites because of school has never really sat well with me. It's nice to know that people are making an effort to stop companies from stealing information but I also don't like how it is only for Kindergarten through the 12th grade. I think these types of laws should be passed for college students as well. We as college students has more to lose. We have jobs and we are working towards a future career. We are learning how to handle money and most of the time, technology is a huge part of all of that. Students in general should be protected not just Elementary through High school.
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