I Monitor My Students With a Chrome App — and It’s Made a Huge Difference
All virtual classroom monitoring apps are not created equal
I can see everything that my students do on their Google Chrome browsers.
At first, it felt extremely intrusive. When I first read 1984, I never imagined I would be Big Brother, but now I’ve decided to use an app called GoGuardian: It lets me block sites, open and close tabs, and monitor anything that’s happening on my 9th grade students’ Chrome browsers.
It’s not all dystopic, of course. GoGuardian does serve as an excellent instructional tool, the same way screen sharing helps tech support diagnose certain problems. When a student has trouble with their login information, I can see what they typed wrong. When a student doesn’t know where to find an app we need on a given day, I can say “Achieve 3000 is on the second row and second column of your screen, on the left side.”
I speak as a special ed teacher, but I’ve also been on the other side of the camera as a student. Recently I had to use the app ProctorU to take exams for my certification. While taking a test, I had a proctor…
