De La Rosa questions feedback survey availability and GoGuardian monitoring
De La Rosa asks if the 6,491 feedback responses will be made public; Junta commits to sharing them. De La Rosa then asks about GoGuardian monitoring software. Strickland confirms some schools purchase GoGuardian to monitor real-time student device activity in class, but a separate Beacon module is not approved. Monitoring does not extend to take-home devices.
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for the line of questioning.
I think that, you know, what Chair Dinos was just mentioning and the responses is why we see that the
parent community has come together across the city and in CECs to ask for a moratorium.
Not necessarily because, you know, because there are concerns, but also because there are huge gaps in our understanding of how the technology is being deployed and when.
And I think we do need the time to be able to wrap our arms around what is happening in our classrooms.
I wanted to ask specifically about, you said that in your testimony that 6,491 folks submitted feedback to the AI guidance, correct?
Yes.
Are any of those comments made publicly available for us to see?
They are not currently made publicly available, but we will get them.
It is our intention to share them.
To make them publicly available.
Great.
Does the DOE monitor student computer use in classrooms through programs like GoGuardian or any other monitoring tools?
Or additional apps.
You take that.
I got it.
Some schools can purchase and use GoGuardian.
They use the feature that monitors that the students are on task with whatever ed tech program is happening in the classroom.
There is a, and just to be clear, there's a separate module of GoGuardian called Beacon that is not approved for use and is not used in any of our schools.
And the devices, if the devices are take-home devices, it's monitoring them while they're at home too?
No, only in schools.
Only in schools.
And who has access to that information and what information is available through GoGuardian?
The purpose of it is to monitor the real-time status of the device as they're in the classroom for that session.
When it's turned off, all that information is not stored anywhere and used for any other purpose.
So can you just walk me through it?
So my kid is sitting in class, she has her computer open, and she goes to YouTube.
What do they see?
She's not supposed to be on YouTube, let's just say.
Sure.
If the school has purchased GoGuardian and is active for that session, the teacher can see in the GoGuardian monitor that 22 students in the class are on the HMH curriculum, for example.
Another student has opened another window, and they really should be only on the EdTech tool.
And they can detect which student is on another window.
They can see that information live.
I believe the answer to that is correct, yes.
Okay, and so they can turn the students by attention.
They can walk by, follow up, and say, please come back to your assigned task.
Are there any other monitoring tools like GoGuardian that are being deployed in our schools?
Any other tools like GoGuardian?
That's the one that's most prominently used.
I'm not aware of any others that are used across the system in a large way.
And again, they're purchased school by school at this point.
Okay.
I do think that like, you know, that response that I'm aware of causes concern.
We want to know.
And we need to know if there are other monitoring tools.
So it would be helpful if we could get back to the committee.
If there are others, it would be helpful in us understanding.