I tend to compartmentalize my duties as a teacher and district security is not one duty I spend my time thinking about because we have two technology gurus in the building who are in charge of things like this. Each teacher has his/her own computer in the classroom and can save things to the C drive of their particular computers, though the district would prefer that we save things to the H drive on the main district server as it is more secure. The only way to access the H drive is to provide a specific user name and password to get into the system. If there are items on the C drive, anyone can access them by using that specific computer and therefore it's not as secure.
All students and teachers have their own user names and passwords to log into district computers. In the past, the students were assigned student IDs to use as their passwords, however for the first time this year, students have the ability to change their passwords. This is a good thing from a security standpoint, but I find that each time students change their passwords, they forget to write down the new password, and then can't remember how to log in when the time comes.
We are increasingly going paperless at our school and storing more documents on the computer or specific web sites to which our district subscribes. This is helpful because I am able to access student records without having to remember where I put a particular folder. It will always be in the same place.
Our district is moving away from using the social security number as identification and has given each teacher an employee number. I think this is a good thing and will help avoid identity theft.
Teachers have specific drives that have been set aside for different purposes. We have drives for video storage, flip chart storage and personal storage.
My main challenge is remembering all of the different passwords for all of the different web sites and subscriptions. Many of these are assigned by the administrators, and teachers do not get to choose their passwords. This avoids anyone from guessing what the passwords can be, but can be hard to remember all of the different codes. I have a password protected application on my iPhone that I have recently started storing all of my different passwords, but it would be great to only have to keep up with one.
Each teacher has a web page that is accessible to anyone who wants to view it. I post student pictures and student work on my web page, so I must be very careful to remove names from work and word captions carefully. My district in is the process of password protecting all of the web pages, so this is something that I soon won't have to worry about as much.
In the past year, we have had students hack into our system twice, so I know the district is carefully revamping our security protocols. While we want to be on the cutting edge of technology and offer our students access to all the Internet has to offer, at the same time, they are working to keep student records safe and private documents private. We have a Deep Nine subscription that blocks questionable sites from being accessed at school.
Many of the problems I see happening is due to Operator Ignorance. You hear all the time, do not open an email if you're not sure whom it is from, and yet we still have teachers that fall for it all the time. We had three viruses attack the system this year because teachers did not heed the aforementioned warning. Sometimes I get frustrated by the lack of common sense in some teachers. I don't feel I know enough about data management to really make feasible recommendations. I leave that to the experts and do what I'm told.
If you're still reading this, good for you. If you're not, I don't blame you!
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