Breakthroughs in classroom management and content filtering tools have helped keep students away from outside threats such as harmful online content, but one of the greatest threats to any school’s digital safety net comes from within: the students themselves.
Even before the widespread proliferation of digital tools in classrooms, students have been rapidly becoming more tech-savvy and outpacing both expectations and the capabilities of several less-adept districts to prevent them from getting into trouble. Today, the chief way that students are slipping through holes in school security is with unregulated apps such as VPNs that shield their activity from view. Most students aren’t doing this for anything malicious and are just looking to distract themselves during class with games and movies.
However, these apps act as a gaping hole in the school’s digital fence, leaving students to freely explore all manner of harmful or potentially dangerous material such as pornography, information on weapons or traps set by abusers.
The apps used by students to dance around security and filtering are myriad, running the gamut from sophisticated and dedicated tools to surprisingly devious uses of otherwise innocuous software. As an example of the latter, some school districts have noted that students have taken to embedding complete movie files inside of a PowerPoint presentation as a means of sneaking it past the school’s ability to easily detect it when they watch in the middle of class.
Some of the most popular apps used to bypass filters include Tor, Psiphon, Ultrasurf and Proton VPN. These apps, commonly marketed as “censorship circumvention tools,” are designed to both conceal and anonymize users, freeing them from any active filtering while also hiding their identities from anyone else who may be watching — even including Internet service providers and governments. Again, most students are using these tools just to get away with common hijinks in class, but the potential danger of them is too great for schools to ignore. Tor, in particular, is known as one possible gateway to the dark web, which is replete with content so highly illegal and dangerous that it’s regularly monitored by the FBI.
Many school districts don’t yet realize the dangers posed by these apps and their ability to punch directly through their security measures. For example, one district in Houston that had seemingly gotten by with a basic firewall ended up logging more than 280 million flags of worrying student activities upon switching to a more nuanced solution that tracked these apps.
The technical sophistication of today’s students demands that school IT departments learn from their habits and deploy security measures that can match their savviness. The best schools today make use of multilayered security strategies that mix nuanced content filtering with app-based control and management dashboards. While it also blocks the circumvention tools discussed above, this approach has the added benefit of introducing controls over less malicious apps that are commonly used to create distractions in class, such as Spotify and Discord, a chat platform popular with today’s students.
The continued adoption of technology both in and outside of the classroom is going to see students becoming ever more tech savvy as time goes on. School leaders need to recognize this and take the necessary steps sooner rather than later if they hope to keep up with their young learners’ resourcefulness.
Justin Reilly is the CEO of Impero Software, a company that makes tools for classroom management, safety and remote access.
