Monitoring Online Activity

685 Words2 Pages

Schools should not be monitoring students’ online activity. It is an invasion of the student’s privacy and violates their right of speech, and it reduces trust between the student and the teacher. Additionally, it is not the job of the teacher to keep track of what the student is doing online, but it is the job of the parent. If the child is not following the rules created by the parents, it is the parent’s job to enforce the rules, not the teacher. When schools monitor students’ online activity, they have access to all sorts of private information. In fact, multiple states are against this belief, and some have even passed laws prohibiting schools from acquiring students’ passwords. As Illinois Public Act 098-0129 states, “It is unlawful for a post-secondary school to request or require a student or his or her parent or guardian to provide a password or other related account information in order to gain access to the student's account or profile on a social networking …show more content…

Teachers should not be monitoring the students because their job is to teach, not to micromanage the students. When there is a problem, they should refer to the parents to fix the problem. It is the parent's job to raise the children in the right way, not the teacher’s job. However, schools can monitor students when the students are using school-issued devices. This is fair because the devices belong to the school, and they (the school) have the entire right to monitor them. As Maria Shepard, a teacher at Princeton Day in New Jersey has said, “If the device is not school-owned and is not being used on the school campus, schools should not monitor a student’s online activity. If an issue arises, the student’s parents could manage it.” If the device does not belong to the school, neither the school nor the teachers should monitor it; It should be left for the parents to take care

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