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Keeping Students Safe in the Digital World

Monitoring Applications

Driven by an increasing concern for safety both online and in the classroom, more student data is being collected and analyzed than ever before. We want to better understand the various applications that make this possible.

Educational systems have become increasingly online and digital, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Awareness of possible threats to student safety both on and offline (e.g., cyberbullying, self-harm, online predators, etc.) has led to a renewed imperative to monitor students, especially through new scopes of data available through these online infrastructures. The task of collecting, storing, and analyzing student data for possible threats takes time and resources, so many school systems leave “dataification” to third-party companies which we call monitoring applications.

As part of the larger project, our team is currently surveying and analyzing promotional websites for monitoring applications used by North Carolina’s districts and charter schools. We aim to better understand trends and themes within the increasingly granular, omnipresent surveillance offered to school administrations. These findings will help better inform our conversations with teachers, students, technology directors and school administrators about their experience working with these applications.