I am a teacher at a school where every student is issued a laptop. Part of that issuance includes signing a consent form, which of course no one reads. Buried in that laptop consent form is a line saying that the school may record keystrokes and screenshots on the laptops. We do that to catch anyone doing anything they shouldn’t be doing with the school property.It’s my job to monitor the laptops.
There is a program that scans the keystroke logs for certain words, like s***** and swear words, and alerts me to look at that student’s logs further. A few weeks ago, I got an alert to look deeper into the activity for one of my female students. She had been typing some VERY s***** things on her school laptop.
I discovered that she has been emailing her boyfriend from school. But the logs enough aren’t enough to go to the principal with, so I set the program to also begin taking screen shots every 15 seconds of laptop usage.
Today I looked at those screen shots. Hundreds of them. Mostly nothing – her typing papers or surfing the net.
Then, during lunch, she took her laptop into the bathroom and put on a show for her boyfriend. Judging from the every-15-seconds pictures I got of it, he is a VERY lucky guy.
I have decided that, since she is about to graduate in two weeks anyway, and she can get expelled for this even though she is 18, I will just let it go. No sense ruining her college future. She will never know that I have seen these. She may even do a few more in the next two weeks. The big question is, should I be saving these?
