Thursday, March 25th, 2021, Volume 15 Issue 83
I think this is something that we can all agree on. Even for students who thrive being in their home environment to learn, struggles with technology and being self-motivated is tricky for most students.
One thing that has been added to the difficulty of most of our students is the chat function of Teams that allows students to chat privately. Adults are not able to see the content of these chats so they cannot be monitored. This has led to a few kinds of problems:
Students in other classes and even in other schools can send messages to each other. We have had instances of middle school students messaging students in our school, even when they don’t know our students. This has resulted in students feeling upset, angry, or fearful in some cases.
Each week, we can run a report that shows us how many chats students participated in a day but gave us no other information. This report showed us that several students from each class participated in over 100 chats each day. This amount of chatting keeps students from fully engaging in classroom learning.
Understandably, we have had situations of students using unkind words in the chat to each other. Learning to resolve conflict is a normal part of life. However, sometimes we have received reports of chats that crossed the line from unkind to unsafe.
Our teachers, staff and I feel responsible to make sure school is a safe place for students. We would not give students a technology tool at school without supervising it’s use. Since we are not able to monitor private chat, we are not able to supervise it. Since early this year, we have had parents and teachers asking us to turn the private chat off, but we were told that this was not possible. After a particularly serious incident occurred last week, we investigated this again and learned that we were now able to do this.
We have heard from a few families that they were upset that turning off private chat was upsetting for their student because they count on it for social interactions. I am sure there are students who were using private chat in responsible ways. Ultimately, we need to make the decision that is best for our school as a whole. Students will continue to have access to the chat in their class Teams meeting. There will be no change to this functionality. This is a place that teachers can share information with students, students can respond to questions from their teacher and classmates, and teachers can post the links for students to join their specialist classes. Teachers and staff can view what happens in this chat, supporting students in using kind words and keeping this a safe place for all.
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