Learning Apps Outstrip School Oversight, and Loss of Student Privacy Is at Risk
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I personally believe schools are too quick to jump on the "new tech" bandwagon without actually evaluating whether their new shiny apps are actually more effective in teaching than the traditional methods. It's like the CSMP madness x 10. You have schools promoting "one laptop per child" when numerous studies have some that laptops in the classroom decrease material retention. A lot of these additions are just so the schools can look better on paper.
I remember when my high school installed smartboards under some upgrade-tech initiative. Very few teachers actually need the extra capabilities that smartboards had. It was all so they could impress parents with their "state of the art" classrooms.
All of this experimentation is often occurring with ANY sort of cost-benefit analysis or performance benchmarking.
On top of that it experimentation on -- human children!
I'm arguing against tech change blindly initiated by educrats who are easily suckered by sales pitches at conferences. This is also what is happening now with such a low barrier of entry to edtech market.
Data really should be anonymized behind a token from a school provided OAuth2 login server... actually tracking student information in the applications shouldn't happen in an identifiable way to said application. Unfortunately many IT jobs in government pay less than half of what a corporate position will.
That might be great in the US (although US privacy laws are generally pretty shithouse compared to Europe, for example), but there's also a huge push of these products into overseas markets with little to no sign that there's any adherence to local laws.)