This year, Mountlake Terrace High School transitioned to a new site blocker, GoGuardian. Teachers can use GoGuardian to restrict students to specific websites that they are using in class, similar to the previous site blocker, Hapara. Many teachers have this set to a specific schedule to activate automatically so that they can keep students from going off topic without having to activate GoGuardian at the start of class. However, combined with Terrace’s frequent modified schedules like extended pass schedule, errors can frequently occur where GoGuardian activates at times it’s not supposed to. This can keep you locked in a session for longer than the relevant class period, keeping you from being able to do your work in the next period which may require new tabs.
While technology errors are bound to happen and can be solved, small stresses and inconveniences can mean a lot to students who are already worn out from school. Terrace’s everyday automatic use of GoGuardian is keeping students from following along in their classes and learning about responsibility. We should remove these automatic sessions, and if GoGuardian is kept at all, it should be restricted to only be used when it is actually needed.
Typically if a GoGuardian session runs past the period it is supposed to be active, the next teacher’s session will take you out of the old one when it puts you in the new session. This can solve the issue sometimes, but there are lots of reasons this wouldn’t always work.
If your next teacher doesn’t use GoGuardian or you are in a free period or lunch, then you would need to figure out another solution or go to chromebook support. More time spent solving these problems cuts into student’s work time or downtime, just wasting it on trying to cope with bugs that shouldn’t even be happening.
Similar issues can occur when there are substitute teachers. If students need to access a website that’s normally blocked on their GoGuardian sessions, the substitute likely won’t know how to turn the session off. If the teachers realize ahead of time they could turn it off beforehand, but if they don’t then students are left unable to complete their work.
This can waste the whole class period, since students can’t even work on other homework on their chromebook.
Not just errors can be a result of GoGuardian making school more frustrating for students though. Many students use Spotify or other music sites when they are working independently, which can help drown out noise to stay focused. These sites are almost always blocked by GoGuardian sessions, leaving many students unable to focus during independent work times. Similarly, many students have tabs open which they are actively working on, some of which don’t save and after GoGuardian blocks them, their work in progress is lost.
The point of GoGuardian is to help students stay on task, but most of the time if a student doesn’t want to be on task they find other ways to bypass GoGuardian or just go on their phones.
Meanwhile when students do want to be on task and learn they have to constantly face little annoyances like it activating at the wrong time, causing a huge lag spike when it activates, or not letting them use their pre-existing tabs even after it is disabled. Small road bumps like this can make a student fall behind in a lesson and lose track of what the teacher is saying. With classes as large as they are, teachers don’t really have time to help out an individual student in the middle of a lesson.
One of the most important lessons of high school is how to take responsibility for yourself, so students can learn to be independent without an authority figure always making sure they are doing the right thing.
How are students meant to learn this skill if they can’t be trusted to even stay on the right tab? If there’s always something stopping them from doing bad, students won’t be able to learn the consequences of their actions until they’re adults in a situation that really matters.
GoGuardian seems to only cause more and more problems, and even when it functions as intended it still doesn’t help students, only stops them. Students need a system which supports their learning, not one that adds more problems to their everyday life.
There could still be benefits to using GoGuardian for situations like tests and quizzes to prevent students from cheating, but even in those cases GoGuardian should be monitored by teachers to ensure that it is working as intended and not adding more stress to the students of Terrace.
