Oleh Diposting pada

When I was growing up, I never gave much thought to the communications between my parents and my teachers. Typically, there was a back-to-school night; if ever I did something wrong, the communication was made in a phone call from the teacher or principal; and there were letters/results that needed to be signed by my parents.

Now, if you were raised in the 80s/90s and are a little bit like me, there’s a chance that your parents didn’t always see these letters/results and the letters maybe had a forged signature or two. To be fair, karma caught up with me on a few occasions and my son wrote a note to his teacher once as well signing it with “Love, name redacted’s Mom”.

While my son’s note gave all involved a chuckle, in all seriousness, technology has now enabled communications between parents and teachers and also teachers and their students. Likewise, there are multiple ways for students to connect with other students. With all these tech-enabled communications for school, there are multiple “human element” fail points – so being a security company with a blog, we’d be remiss not to offer some tips to keep you and your kids safe and sound.

Parent to teacher

Who remembers the pandemic? You know, the one that introduced us to the lovely world of remote learning. At the time, it was nice to see how the educational system was flexible enough to embrace technology quickly and assure that the kiddos’ education could continue.

Fast-forward a few years to today and the technology still has a firm grip within the school systems. As a resident of the U.S., my children are now using Chromebooks vs textbooks and there are various apps that the teachers use to keep us up to date on progress. There are a number of these apps and they’ll vary from case to case, but ours are Remind and Google Classroom.

While these platforms are very integrated and easy, they still also tie into emails. So parents should be extra careful to make sure that the sender and the links within mails aren’t malicious.

Student to teacher

The above-listed apps are also used for students to communicate with teachers; however, they also have the added level of an internal email that could be used to communicate with the teachers directly. While email in Google’s ecosystem should be locked down and be more of an internal messenger, it’s good practice to let kids know they should be cautious of what they’re sending to teachers, as well as the links that teachers are sending along that direct them outside their school’s ecosystem.

Student to student

Perhaps the most tricky part of kids going to tech-enabled school is that we live in a tech-enabled society. This means that (almost) everyone has a smartphone or other connected device and the ills that come with them – including messaging apps, social networks, a camera and SMS.

Perhaps the biggest risk that we have when discussing schools and tech is the phones within the pockets of our little ones. There are simply too many avenues for sharing that our kids can take advantage of. As parents, we need to make sure that we have them set up with a device that’s secure. And before you say it, NO – the device is not secure out of the box, despite marketing messaging. You should make sure that you install a reliable security solution on any device your kids use to help add in a layer of extra protection. Here are some tips that can help further securing the phone.

Sharing is not always caring

This final tip is for both parents and kids. Repeat after me: Sharing is not always caring.

While many applications provide the ability to share what you’ve received via various channels, when it comes to schooling, this should be avoided. Also, as mentioned, our phones are the biggest risk to us.

We literally have at our fingertips the ability to broadcast our opinions, thoughts, pictures, videos…  even what we’re doing on the toilet in real time and to the whole world. Sure, this is empowering, but it is also something that could come back to hurt us.

This is a lesson we need to remember as parents and also to impart to our children. Being prudent is a huge part of life: not everything needs to be shared. We all need to take a minute to take a step back and think about what we’re doing before hitting send.

Now, before I preach to the choir, I’ll admit that I often post stupid things: you can see this on my X, for example; however, I still think before hitting send. As parents, we need to let our kids know that the stuff they post could not only get them in trouble (broadcasting fights, illegal activity, etc.), but also that there are things that could hurt them well down the line in the employment space. As they say… the internet never forgets!


#protect #childs #privacy #social #networks #IMs

Oleh Diposting pada

Previous posts in our back-to-school series have covered how to protect your child’s devices and explain the importance of cybersecurity in school. Today we talk about the core, and often unavoidable, apps used in modern education. This means electronic diaries and virtual classrooms, plus videoconferencing for distance learning. They are all insecure.

Electronic diaries

Electronic study-diaries and virtual classroom websites are used these days to help administer  the educational process. Educators use them to share lesson schedules, homework assignments, and announcements. And parents can see their kids’ grades, or even chat with their teachers.

The main problem with such web applications is the substandard protection of personal data that’s provided. In 2020, the attorney general of the U.S. state of New Mexico even filed a lawsuit against Google Classroom, citing the company’s alleged practice of collecting personal data from children and using it for commercial purposes. And in 2022, the Dutch Ministry of Education introduced a number of restrictions on the use of Google services in schools for the exact same reason.

Unfortunately, in most cases parents have no control over what services schools decide to use. The story of Google Classroom is by no means the worst. Issues with the service have been openly discussed for a long time, and Google has been forced to take note and beef up its protection. But, as a father of three, I’ve had the (mis)fortune of seeing other electronic diaries in action, where the situation with personal data storage and transfer is nothing if not murky.

What can parents do about this? Asking the school for all details about privacy and personal data usage in all services you need is a good start. And teach your kid how to leave as little personal data as possible on such sites.

Videoconferencing

The covid lockdown was a big eye-opener for many kids: turns out you don’t need to go to school! Lessons suddenly became more fun but for the wrong reasons: my daughter chats with her teacher in one window — and watches a movie or plays a game in another (or on a different device).

Such distance “learning” only adds to the worries of parents. Even before covid, we had to monitor what our kids were downloading, since banking Trojans, spyware and ransomware are forever sneaking in under the guise of legal apps — even in Google Play and other official stores. But at least in school they were less exposed to such threats, because internet usage was not generally a part of in-class learning.

With the distance-learning revolution, however, there are now even more apps on our kids’ tablets for us parents to fret about, as well as unlimited internet use for “study” purposes.

And although the lockdowns are long over, many schools continue to practice distance learning for some classes. Meanwhile, Zoom, Teams, and other videoconferencing platforms remain vulnerable to attacks. The most obvious consequence of such attacks, as before, is personal data leakage. But it can get worse: if a malicious third party were to gain access to a virtual classroom, they might show some decidedly “non-kid-suitable” videos.

And even if parents are versed in the safe hosting of video chats, they are unlikely to be able to influence the school’s choice of tools. Here, too, you should ask the school for an explanation as to why an insecure program was chosen.

In addition, you need to teach your kids the basic safety rules of using such apps. In particular, your child should learn to turn off both the microphone and camera when not required, as well as to blur the background and disable screen-sharing by default. And of course, your child should never accept video chat invitations from strangers — or communicate with any if they do show up uninvited to a video conference.

And it goes without saying that all devices your child uses should be protected with a reliable security solution — one that guards against viruses and personal data leaks on computers and mobile devices, and keeps your kid’s privacy intact. Remember that with your free annual subscription to Kaspersky Safe Kids as part of Kaspersky Premium, in addition to total protection for all devices, you get powerful parental controls over your child’s online activity and offline location.


#Backtoschool #threats #virtual #classrooms #videoconferencing