Google Workspace for Education

 

Mary Star of the Sea High School has been using Google Workspace for Education [GWfE] since 2010 for faculty/staff and since 2015 for students (student email accounts). Google Workspace for Education primarily is a suite of services/programs like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Google has been a reliable and dynamic partner with regular product improvements and additional features coming out several times a year. In addition, Google has created Android operating system for mobile devices and Chrome OS for laptop devices that integrate well with GWfE. Google accounts also integrate well with Windows operating system and, to a lesser degree, with iOS and Mac OS. Therefore, school-issued Google accounts have become the central identity and user management system at Mary Star of the Sea High School and played a crucial role during the distance learning period during the Covid Pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In fact, Google Classroom has proved to be such a valuable tool for organizing, presenting, and testing that the school has continued using it even after the end of distance learning.

All advancements in technology bring about benefits but also introduce some new problems and challenges. In case of Google Workspace for Education, the challenge is to monitor and control all the information that is being shared by the school internally and externally, especially considering that the students are minors. Google has been very pro-active and deliberate in giving the administrators of Google Workspace for Education a lot of tools needed to monitor and control what services and programs are being used by minors and what information is shared, or could be shared, within the school and to the public. The major concerns are: what personally identifiable data is collected and how and by whom that data is processed as well as potential student access to inappropriate content or communications while using a specific service/website.

A website used to be just a website, but those days are long gone… Today many websites are better defined as programs or services (think of Gmail, Instagram, or Facebook). Most popular websites have their visitors register an account and have the ability to track and aggregate user activity logs and may sell or otherwise process that information for marketing purposes. Many websites as a part of the registration collect personally identifiable information (PII) like name, email or profile picture. This process of sharing PII is accelerated with Google, Microsoft or Facebook acting as an identity provider for account creation and single sign-on (SSO)--think of buttons you might have seen on websites saying “Sign in with Google”, “Sign in with Microsoft” or “Sign in with Facebook”. What makes things more complicated is that each website/program has their own privacy and data collection and data sharing policies written in difficult to understand legal terms. As you can see, privacy protection, data collection, and data sharing management is quite an elaborate task.

 

Google Workspace for Education Terms of Service require the school to confirm parental consent for the use of various Google Workspace for Education [GWfE] services and 3rd party services that are authenticated through GWfE. There are three broad categories of services: (1) GWfE Core Services that have very strict privacy and data protections designed specifically for the K-12 environment e.g. Gmail, (2) GWfE Additional Services that are designed primarily for consumer use e.g. YouTube, and (3) Third-Party Services (non-Google) that have their own privacy and data collection/sharing policies e.g. Canva (an online program for computer graphics).

All GWfE services and 3rd party services that are accessible to Mary Star of the Sea High School students, have been vetted by the school technology department and the school administration and deemed to have educational value and sufficient privacy and data collection/sharing safeguards. The school has a general parental consent at the time of yearly registration for the use of the Internet and school computers. In addition, recent changes in GWfE Terms of Service requires that the school confirm parental consent specifically for the use of GWfE Core, Additional, and 3rd Party services. Each school year you will be receiving an email communication from the school to explain more about the services that are available to the students and to confirm your consent with an e-signature.