For related blogs, please visit the following links:
http://rspspantherspride.blogspot.com/
http://eyeceeu.blogspot.com/
http://kevinskorner67.blogspot.com/
Saturday, December 4, 2010
How Have Things Changed
Not very many years ago, student grades were written on paper and delivered by hand from the teachers to secretaries. Those secretaries, after compiling all of a student's grades, would then put one copy in a student's file and mail the other one home to the parents. There was a potential for papers to be lost in the shuffle and for students or parents to lose their report cards, but the system, though time-consuming, was effective. Now, in the year 2010, most schools have adopted online grading systems. Is this a good thing?
Honestly, I'm not quite certain. It does "eliminate the middle-man," meaning that teachers can submit their grades directly, thus avoiding the possibility of errors when copying grades from one sheet to a master sheet. However, here's the problem: many people now have the potential to access information considered private. Schools have put in place firewalls, passwords, secure websites, but the truth of the matter is that there is no way to make anything on the Internet completely inaccessible to all but a handful of people.
For example, several years ago, we had a situation in which a student managed to hack into a computer and retrieve the login and password information of several teachers. He then logged into their accounts in order to print out copies of their semester exams and to manipulate his own grades before his parents got a chance to view them. One might say that, 30 years ago, a student could have broken into a filing cabinet and stolen his own file, but that would have been much more time-consuming, much noisier, and much easier to detect. This technological indiscretion was of a far more subtle nature. And so, I cannot help wondersing whether our current system is actually better than the previous one, at least in terms of protection of privacy.
Honestly, I'm not quite certain. It does "eliminate the middle-man," meaning that teachers can submit their grades directly, thus avoiding the possibility of errors when copying grades from one sheet to a master sheet. However, here's the problem: many people now have the potential to access information considered private. Schools have put in place firewalls, passwords, secure websites, but the truth of the matter is that there is no way to make anything on the Internet completely inaccessible to all but a handful of people.
For example, several years ago, we had a situation in which a student managed to hack into a computer and retrieve the login and password information of several teachers. He then logged into their accounts in order to print out copies of their semester exams and to manipulate his own grades before his parents got a chance to view them. One might say that, 30 years ago, a student could have broken into a filing cabinet and stolen his own file, but that would have been much more time-consuming, much noisier, and much easier to detect. This technological indiscretion was of a far more subtle nature. And so, I cannot help wondersing whether our current system is actually better than the previous one, at least in terms of protection of privacy.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Introduction to my blog
Hi everyone, and welcome to my blog! In this day and age, many schools now store very sensitive information using the internet. This of course means that said information is more vulnerable than it would have been 50 years ago, when everything was stored in locked file cabinets behind bolted doors. Despite these changes, how do we continue to ensure that sensitive information remain private?
I welcome your ideas and comments.
I welcome your ideas and comments.
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