MCPS announced the online tool GoGuardian would be phased out starting the 2024-2025 school year due to budget cuts after the Jan. 23 Board of Education Meeting,
Most MCPS students are familiar with GoGuardian, which was released in 2015, and has since been a tool used by teachers to monitor students’ online activity on their school chromebooks to ensure they stay on task.
GoGuardian also has the feature to be used remotely, allowing teachers to monitor students’ outside of school, and thus have the ability to close webpages on a student’s computer, raising questions about infringements on privacy for MCPS students. Students and parents have voiced complaints that personal browsing history could be accessed and information that could be exposed, such as political affiliation or other information that are usually regarded as private.
“I hate GoGuardian. I am glad it’s being cut. I think it does infringe on students’ right to privacy,” junior Norman Meyer said.
According to MoCo 360, a poll conducted by Sami Saeed on Instagram stories on Jan. 23, 68 percent of respondents “totally” supported the stopping of the use of GoGuardian, 16 percent “somewhat” did, 5 percent “not really” and 10 percent “not at all.”
However, many teachers in MCPS are concerned by the cut of GoGuardian. The online tool allowed teachers to monitor their students during class to ensure students were on task and not cheating. In many classroom across MCPS, Go Guardian is utilized as a tool to make sure the chromebooks were being used to their full potential during class, and were not infringing on students’ ability to focus and learn.
IB History and TOK teacher Kerri Fry is a big proponent of GoGuardian, using it daily in her classes for timed writing assignments and online quizzes. She is now planning the next school year and what that means for her class without GoGuardian.
“I feel like with this gone, the only way to really assess what students know is to have them maybe just write on paper, go back to the way things used to be without GoGuardian, without things like turnitin.com, which was also taken away, so it’s hard,” Ms. Fry said.
Teachers may need to go back to traditional ways of testing and teaching to ensure productivity and academic honesty in the classroom during the next school year because of the defunding of Go Guardian. Many students do find it easier to complete assignments on the computer, and cutting Go Guardian could put students and teachers alike at a disadvantage.
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