Students may have noticed that Haldane’s ad blocker has changed during the past month. Well, it isn’t a coincidence. Since mid-March of this year, applications such as YouTube, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Translate have been blocked on school websites. This is because of Google’s violation of New York’s Education Law Section 2d, which requires third-party contractors like Google to comply with certain data privacy requirements. While the Google core services like Google Classroom and Gmail remain unaffected, other previously mentioned services will be unavailable on Haldane school accounts.
When asked about why the school district is now blocking Google Earth and Google Maps, Leah Horn, Haldane’s Technology Director, said that it has largely to do with the street view function of the service. “Google refuses to manage the media, the data, the photos that are on there,” Horn said. “We’ve all heard of inappropriate photos being caught by the Google cars driving down the street. It just gets uploaded into Google Maps. And there’s no filtering. There’s no management of that data. And therefore they can’t, in good conscience, allow anybody under 18 to access it.”
Luckily, at least for educational purposes, some workarounds can be found. Horn said that, for YouTube, if the videos are embedded directly into Google Slides, then they can still be used in class. So, if students notice videos are now exclusively on slideshows, that is the reason.
Before the recent changes, Google Translate was used by teachers to help students who are not primary English speakers with their schoolwork. Now, the school has purchased a premium version of the program Quizizz, as well as an AI software called Brisk Teaching, in order to allow teachers to communicate more easily with their students who are non-native English speakers. However, High School Principal Julia Sniffen noted that the blocking of Google Translate might not be a bad thing. “We have students who use it appropriately, and then we have students who don’t use it appropriately,” she said, “So there might be some good that comes from that.”
It is also worth noting that only the website of Google Translate has been banned, not the application that appears embedded in Google Search. Most of the basic translation services are still available, but users on the school network won’t be able to access the more in-depth and longer translation functionality provided by the website.
However, not all services have a work-around. Horn noted that Google Earth and Google Maps have no current work-around established, despite their fairly widespread usage in classes.
“Google Maps and Google Earth are such powerful educational tools. I don’t even know if we realized as a district how many teachers were using it,” Horn said. “My hope is that Google will realize if you can’t use this in education, then there needs to be another solution. So either they’ll police it and filter it and make it safe for under 18, or maybe they’ll become a new Google Earth for Education where those photos that people can upload or the Google car catches won’t be used.”
While the absence of these frequently used tools might not be felt as strongly amongst students, Google’s actions have forced teachers and administrators to come up with creative work-arounds to achieve their objectives without full access to these powerful tools.
