Poll: Does your school prevent your team from using certain software due to data privacy or related reasons?
US public school; yes
US public school; no
US private school; yes
US private school; no
Non-US school; yes
Non-US school; no
Community team; I want to participate in the poll
Not on a team; I want to participate in the poll
0voters
This may or may not include Slack, Onshape, Inventor, Solidworks, Jira, Notion, Monday, Github, Smugmug, etc.
I understand “related reasons” is very vague. Use your best judgement. I would personally include “the school blocked github because false sense of security” for context.
It’s not the end of the world, but building code with new/updated vendordeps requires a hotspot or something like that.
Some other websites are blocked, but nothing serious for FRC (more like streaming websites or inappropriate ones).
For installing softwares, we use our computers and some we managed to get from sponsors or bought, so we aren’t limited on installation.
We were an inventor team, but our school moved away from Autodesk products and providing licenses due to student privacy issues. We switched to OnShape in 2023. We still use fusion 360 for CAM though (but not through student school accounts).
We’re using Microsoft teams now. The students all have outlook accounts I believe? Myself and a few other mentors are added as guests to the channel.
It’s entirely dependent on each team tho Joe it may get enforced.
Another team of mine uses Discord.
The only real issue we’ve had with software was convincing the district to allow us to use Slack for team communications due to concerns about the possibility for it’s use as a way for adults to have private, unmonitored conversations with students.
We eventually assuaged these concerns by instituting a policy that no one-on-one DMs should take place between adults and students (group chats with multiple adults/students are ok, though we strongly encourage keeping things in actual channels), as well as pointing out that Slack does have an “export” feature that admins can use to go through messages if needed.
Beyond that, we haven’t had any issues with getting software installed on computers as needed, though in our case it helps to have both the school districts former and current Technology Directors as coaches on the team.
We have the same policy, and took it a step further by giving every student their own channel, accessible by them and all mentors. It was a pain in the butt to set up, but gets used frequently! Great for following up about permission slips, attendance, etc.
We also had to switch off slack. Seeing a lot of that here.
Seems that it might do slack good to try and implement something that could provide youth protection and somehow certify themselves as safe for schools to allow.
That’s surprising. As a team in a DOE, we have been using Slack for the past two years. Might just be an “us” thing I guess. We can use twitch or discord though (I’m assuming your team can’t either?)
We are going to be requesting many sites/programs to be removed from IT whitelist, this year students couldn’t use sites like McMaster or Amazon.
The teacher accounts could do twitch but many things were definitely limited.
At our school, most software, if not all, are blocked.
tomfoolery
So every year for those with no personal laptops, we install the wpilib software using non-destructive and reversable bypasses.
Our school isn’t very smart about cybersecurity, accidentally leaving a small linux partition on the laptops wont get you caught.
Still, some downloads require staff Wi-Fi, which I get from any random logged in computer and its sent off to my AWS server through a silly thing called executable usbs
If your talking about web tools like ms teams or slack, we just have a rotating list of working vpn endpoints that teammates can check.
I say this because the schools reasons are privacy, even though most of these sites and software’s are secure enough. If the school wanted us to be safe online, they would re-enable the basic wi-fi safety features that come with modern standards.
We limit our use of school resources. We buy our own computers and avoid theirs as they are too expensive and completely locked down. We use the schools guest network for the internet. And when things are blocked we use a VPN or tether to phones.
I was actually thinking about this a bit too as I was making my earlier post, and it occurred to me that one solution that might be the most user-friendly would be to create a sort of “supervisor” account that isn’t anyones primary account, but that you could require everyone to attach into any and all DM conversations. That way you don’t have some admin constantly getting notifications for messages they don’t need to see, but if you did need the ability to quickly go in and check DMs you could because that account would be part of all the conversations. Might be worth trying as an added safety layer.
