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 watching me with a camera the whole time. I had to show the whole room to make sure I had no cheating materials, had to make sure my phone was out of reach, and had to show my arms to make sure I had no watch or material written on my arms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has expressed concern about proctoring apps like ProctorU, and as a teacher, I completely agree that video monitoring is too invasive for K-12 students. But GoGuardian seems to be the app that stays on the safe side of the line between monitoring and surveillance.
As an instructional tool, GoGuardian is like magic. I separate my career as an educator during virtual learning into two eras — before GoGuardian and after GoGuardian. It is a game changer that allows me to keep all students on track and open tabs when they’re confused, and close tabs when they’re distracted. I’ve been able to engage students in ways I hadn’t been able to before I started using GoGuardian, which is…
