With the summer season officially here, it’s a good time to remind our readers that summer break is not a time to take a vacation from protecting students using school-issued devices and collaborative learning platforms.
School districts across the country recently completed perhaps the most bizarre year in history—one that saw more than 55 million students complete their school year through distance learning. As districts quickly ramped up to prepare their students for the transition to distance learning, they purchased and introduced an untold number of laptops, reportedly taxing the supply.
In addition to the increase in laptops, many districts that previously collected laptops at the end of the year have told students to keep them over the summer break. By allowing students to keep their devices, these districts are hoping to encourage learning over the break in an effort to reduce the summer slide, which has been further compounded by closing out the school year with distance learning.
Seattle Public Schools, a district of more than 55,000 students, is allowing all students except graduating seniors to keep their laptops to continue distance learning this summer and beyond if needed. According to a District Administration article, the Washington district anticipated that 20,000 to 30,000 would participate in remote summer school. Similarly, California's Stockton Unified School District, which has nearly 38,000 students, is allowing all students except graduates and eighth-graders—the latter seemingly to upgrade the devices in preparation for high school—to keep their Chromebooks over summer break.
All of these efforts to ensure continued learning and help reduce summer learning loss—combined with pandemic-related stress and an increase in domestic abuse—mean it’s especially critical to monitor school-issued devices and collaborative learning platforms during the summer months. That’s where a service like Gaggle Safety Management can help.
By combining artificial intelligence and trained safety experts, Gaggle provides real-time analysis and review of students’ use of the district’s online collaboration platforms. We offer administrators, teachers, and parents the peace of mind that students are being protected 24/7/365. And this summer will be an especially busy one for Gaggle—click here to learn more about the improvements we’re making to prepare for the new school year.