Bring your own device

“Bring Your Own Device”

The school district is currently considering testing a “Bring Your Own Device” program next semester, which would allow students to bring their own laptops or tablets to school — and connect to school Wi-Fi — for educational purposes.

“Students would be able log in to the BYOD wireless network using their own device[s] with their current student login,” Enoch Kwok, the district’s director of educational technology, said. “We hope to pilot test such a capability sometime during second semester and monitor how it goes to decide if it will become a permanent offering.”

Many students are optimistic for such a system, which could help increase productivity in some classes.

“It’s just easier; everything’s online,” senior Roshni Dugar said. “If I can just work on [schoolwork] on my own computer and have it all saved on my computer, that would be great.”

Sophomore Kirthan Reddy said he believes that bringing personal computers to school could also help lighten the demand for school-owned computers.

“The problem with the COWs is that there are so few classes that actually have them,” Dugar said. “If you can have your laptop with you the whole time, it’d be a lot more convenient.”

Though the district hopes a BYOD system will be beneficial for everybody, there are a few caveats. For example, not all teachers may make use of such a system.

Junior Gwen Rosenkrantz believes that she could use a personal device in her English class, but not in many other classes.

“In chemistry [and math] we couldn’t really use [our devices effectively],” Rosenkrantz said.

Keenan Kibrick, a special assignment technology teacher, summarized the Oak Park Technology Committee’s discussion about the potential implementation of BYOD.

“The debate comes in [three] parts: security, equitable access to the machines and whether education will change to meet the needs of BYOD,” Kibrick said.

Students, however, have further concerns about the potential system.

“Things are expensive, and you wouldn’t want to break [your devices],” junior Shaun Merritt said. ”That’s why I don’t already bring my own.”

Considering the recent burglary of school computers, protecting student-owned devices from theft presents another challenge.

“I think [BYOD] is a great idea as long as there’s some kind of security framework,” Reddy said.

To prevent abuse of the BYOD system, student Internet access will be filtered and activity monitored when students connect to school Wi-Fi. Still, the school cannot completely control the actions of students on their own devices.

“There’s nothing that can stop someone from using cellular data [to connect to the Internet],” Kibrick said. “Digital citizenship is a major part of it.”

IBoss Content Filter

The school district decided to purchase a new Internet content filter from iBoss in November, which will help the district implement a BYOD program.

A content filter allows the school to selectively block certain websites when using school Internet.

“The district is mandated by law to have a system in place to prevent students from accessing pornographic and otherwise harmful materials on the Internet,” Kwok said. “This federal legislation is known as the Children’s Internet Protection Act.”

This new iBoss content filter has a special new feature — one that the previous content filter lacked — that allows it to decrypt secure data in order to block content more precisely.

The concept is of encryption is simple: for example, when a user accesses Facebook, everything from the username, to the password, to One Direction’s latest status update is secured, so that nobody else can secretly read the data being sent over the Internet. A simple form of encryption might be changing the word “DATA” to “EBUB,” such that each letter of the word is replaced with the next letter of the alphabet. Changing the word back to its original form is consequently known as decryption. Of course, the encryption algorithms used over the Internet are considerably more complicated.

As cyber security expert Sarveshwar Rao explains, the school is able to read this secured data despite the encryption.

By installing a small file called a certificate onto a user’s computer, the school is able to take control of any connection coming through the content filter. The certificate allows the school to read any data going to or from the computer without evoking any errors or warnings.

Normally, if a computer detects that somebody is trying to intercept a user’s secure connection, it will display an error or warn the user about it. The school, however, by installing a small file called a certificate onto the user’s computer, prevents these errors from showing. As a result, the content filter can read any information coming through it, and is allowed to decrypt.

“After [installing a certificate on the device], the content filter or gateway can be the man-in-the-middle between the user/device and the website,” Rao wrote in an email.

As a result, students cannot assume privacy when sending information online.

“Anything and everything being accessed through the content filter is visible and can be logged in plain-text,” Rao wrote.

The purpose behind the content filter is to monitor any inappropriate Internet actions.

“These products are not meant to be used to [record] personal transactions of individuals or personal contents,” Rao wrote. “They are supposed to be used only to look for bad stuff.”

Rao believes that this sort of inspection, aside from filtering harmful Internet content, can be used as a protective measure against malware, hacking and all other types of cybersecurity threats to the school.

“[Internet attackers] now encrypt their communications to beat the security defenses and carry out data breaches/malicious activities,” Rao wrote.

The school is allowed to decrypt student data.

“Students have all signed the district’s student technology acceptable use policy during summer registration which explicitly states that, when using district technology resources … students do not have any expectation of privacy,” Kwok said. “The district will always reserve the right to inspect, monitor and control any activity that takes place on or over its network without notice.”

Merritt, however, said that students who already use school computers shouldn’t be concerned after the introduction of BYOD.

“The school will only know what websites [students] visit while they’re at school,” Merritt said. “I think [using school Wi-Fi] is fine.”