Teaching tools make our lives easier. If it is the EZ-Grader that gives percentages based on the number of questions to interactive whiteboards These tools can be very handy and I started with the Apple Network Administrator Toolkit (ANAT.) It allowed me to monitor students and when students started the machine, it cleared everything from before and gave them a clean image. It was the most important tool I had when teaching elementary. When I moved to high school I needed something similar for my room. The district settled on LanSchool for the monitoring. It was a chance for me to observe the kids and keep track of what they were doing. It also contained the ability to capture screenshots of the student machine for a record. I never really needed the screen capture for anything other than as an exemplar for other students. When it changed, it changed fast and in a big way.
I made the statement early in the blog that I was naming names. In this case, I will not be naming names. It is only fair to let indiscretions be written off as youthful errors and not worth bringing up here. We will call our perpetrator Little Johnny. Little Johnny was sitting in class one day and I walked by and saw that he was looking at his grades in Infinite Campus. It took a few seconds to put it together that there was something amiss. At the time students didn’t have access to Infinite Campus. They did gain access a couple of years later so that they can stay updated on grades. Back to little Johnny who is looking at his grades. I went to my desk and pulled up his machine and started to create screenshots before I fully figured out what was going on. He was changing a couple of his grades. I might have been quiet about it until later and had him before the dean after class. Then he turned to another student in the classroom and asked if she needed and grades changed. What was even better was that the second student was related to a teacher in the building. At this point, I had to get aggressive and turned his machine off, and marched him to the dean’s office.
The story could have easily ended there but his mother worked in the district and because of her position she had much more access to the system. You can see this is getting better. Since I had the screenshots he couldn’t deny it and threw his mother under the bus and said she gave him the password. You can see that is spiraling out of control. There was more. HR had to be involved since the mother was at another school and we really had to include everyone. When the mom was confronted by HR she said “every teacher does that!” This was where I got angry. I said that I have a daughter in the district and I would never think to give her my password. Unfortunately, little Johnny was suspended and mom lost access and which made it difficult to do her job but she was lucky and kept her job. There is even more to the story but I will let sleeping dogs lay and just call it good.