At that point, just loop an actual mentor account in. The advantages of the method we used are 1) no one forgets to include the mentor or decides it’s easier not to, 2) it doesn’t spawn a bunch of group chats with varying levels of mentor involvements that you have to keep track of, and 3) it ensures multiple sets of mentor eyes for safety. Across 43 students this year, I only had one situation come up where a student needed to reach out to me without all other mentors seeing it, and when they did I asked them to add one mentor of their choice (and their older sibling) to the DM. I will say that we are on discord and therefore can add the mentor role instead of having to add all mentors individually, which helps somewhat.
Not necessarily FRC related but my HS blocked the Internet Archive (a night before I turned in a paper relying on it leading me to get a 0) while leaving certain prominent NSFW sites unblocked…
My FRC team uses our own devices due to things like this (and the fact that chromebooks are underpowered crap that can’t run anything right)
Just to clarify here: this includes both network-blocked applications at the firewall level and also legal-blocked applications at the … legal level.
Lets go through an example. I won’t pick a local school district with an existing team so as not to single anyone out, so let’s suppose there’s a rookie team being started at a local school. Suppose this school has joined the SDPC (Student Data Privacy Consortium). This is effectively a union for schools to make agreements with companies on data use. Cool! It’s pretty big - 4 countries, 31 states, 100,000 signed agreements, 12,000 schools. (It’s also based local to me, which might be an influence.)
But usually what winds up happening is that schools will approach these vendors and say “we want to use your product, but you have to follow our data privacy requirements.” These requirements are typically listed via DPA, or Data Privacy Agreement/Addendum. The vendor will then, frankly, not care at all about whether or not Local Public Schools uses their product, and isn’t going to spend any time on this, because their legal department is far too expensive to waste time on signing a DPA from each and every school in America. Instead, the vendor will probably give the school their own DPA and say “here is our DPA, you can agree to it or not, we don’t particularly care.” Most businesses will have a DPA, for example Slack or Notion.
Suppose DPAs get signed. It would then be not very far-fetched for the school admin/IT dept to say that students are only allowed to make accounts for school-related activities with explicitly approved software vendors. Okay. Lets oblige. Lets take a look at the list available to this here rookie…
Okay, cool! The team has access to… Arduino Create… Canva… Code.org… Keep scrolling… More scrolling… Keep going… Next page… Remind… Zoom… Oh. That’s all the recognizable stuff. (I’m sure there are useful tools on there I don’t recognize, my point stands. This is actually more useful tools than I expected. Plus, there are usually a few highly useful tools not listed but still approved like Google Workspace.)
Well that’s not super helpful. I guess we can use Remind and Zoom. This leaves a few questions to ask admin/IT though:
- How do we CAD?
- How do we share code?
- … How do we register students on FIRST Inspires if FIRST isn’t an approved vendor?
And a highly supportive admin will help you figure these out. The average admin probably will tell you to figure it out yourselves. But if you break some of these rules under an unsupportive admin, you are at risk of any staff members of your team losing their job.
One possible solution to a few questions is “could we create a team account for service XYZ that everyone shares?” But, based on historical precedence, the answer to this is “also no.”
The point of this post is to bring awareness to the fact that student data privacy is a rapidly growing focus for school districts and parents in today’s era, and most of it is not supportive of the fundamental needs for a healthy modern FRC team.
I don’t know solutions here, but I do know a problem when I see it.
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Our school blocks non us sites on the school wifi, but we just installed a cloud flare VPN on our code laptops lmao (I think there was one tool we needed that had docs hosted outside of the us, but I can’t remember which one)
github has been blocked on school wifi for two years now. we have t-mobile hotspots in routers for our programming team
Our school’s wifi blocks discord but most of us have vpns or hotspots on ours computers so its not that big of an issue.
interesting our team (694) has been using slack for years without any issues with both the DOE and NYSDOE
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same, we had to get a industrious, very smart and very humble student (me) to get all of programmings computers practically jailbroken so we could actually use them
While we work in a school, we try to run everything ourselves, including our Internet connection. The school has put some restrictions on us, like we have to comply with CIPA laws for filtering and notifications. We have 2 dedicated mentors that exclusively handle all the IT support (servers, Internet, logging, laptops, etc). Part of that comes with being a large organization (roughly 100 students and mentors over 2 FRC teams, plus supporting 3 FTC and now 9 FLL teams).
We choose to have 3 ways to communicate with kids, and they are all logged (Slack, Google Workspace, Remind). All other forms of communication are banned from the team, mainly because we can’t log all traffic. (text messages, Discord because you can’t access private messages)
We do use public Github because it doesn’t have private communications, and have a CAD package internally (we arranged a sponsorship with them), so most our data is internal. We are also looking at going to a self hosted RocketChat over Slack, as Slack is changing their terms next year and we lose our tier of coverage (they want us to pay a significant $$/month/user).
I guess I’m trying to say be careful what programs you use as a team, as you might be exposing yourself to issues. I would hope that any software that FRC corporate promotes (like Github or Monday.com) would have been vetted for school uses, but you might want to double check with your school if they are ok with what you are doing.
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I squirm in my chair every time I read about someone here using a VPN so nonchalantly at school and just want to add a blanket statement here:
Regardless of how “minor”, “harmless”, “educational”, “necessary”, insert any other word phrase etc here you think it is, if the “wrong person” catches you or “takes issue” with what you’re doing not only could you face action against you, but you risk the team’s existence, and your teachers/mentors jobs could be at risk.
Every student I’ve explained this to has always came back with “a wait we can’t use VPNs? but xyz site doesn’t work and how else would I get to it?”, then have to explain to them all the rules and agreements they and their parents at some point have signed about technology usage in school and how a VPN violates them.
My advice is do your best to schmooze the IT people, become their friend, and explain your case the best you can, unfortunately there will be some (particularly in education) that are going to stick to the status quo hard, but if you make their lives hard by trying to get around whatever they have in place it isn’t going to help your case down the road.
To be fair I’m not trying to act all high and mighty here as I may or may not bend/skirt the rules here or there when I feel its needed like using a hot spot, but it’s an assessed risk I take and I never let students do it or mess with said things on a school owned computer…allegedly.
Edit: Also don’t get me started on mentor student discords, that is asking for soooooo much trouble in many (if not all?) of the settings we’re in here
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Twitch! Such a PIA! The others we can work with but wish the school would also leave the internet open on the weekend.
Discord has not been a problem BUT we also heavy monitor it and ask all parents to join as well so everything is completely transparent.
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