Are your students safe with Gmail?

Students' safety in schools. 

A school, just like a home, must be able to provide safety and security such that learning may take place without hindrance. One of the areas of concern for most educationists is the security of the learners.   Learning in the 21st century requires students to collaborate and use technology in their learning among other dimensions too. Emails are a great tool for effective and formal digital communication at school and failure to enforce some security or code of conduct may end up making students vulnerable to some cyber criminal activities. To make use of all Gmail applications, the teachers and students must have an email they use. Fortunately, Google mail has some features that would require to be looked at and ensure the students' safety. 

Some pundits may argue that students must never have access to emails at school and proponents of the usage of digital tools think that this thought is retrogressive and of the yesteryears. The digital world is here for everyone and instead of resisting it, we must embrace it and use it to enhance teaching and learning. The following blog post is going to look at some ideas on how one may make use of the inbuilt features of Google mail to enhance the safety of learners. Google apps for education has some inbuilt features and tools that make it possible to provide a safe working environment for teachers and students. 

Organisational Units (OU)

In the Google admin console, organisational units must be created and have units according to the organisation's functional area. All students must have sub-units where there are lower primary, upper primary, and lower and upper secondary units. Organisational units are important in ensuring that certain permission is given to a certain group of individuals. 

Some configurations to consider. 

1. Emails are to be limited to certain individuals in the organisation. Senior students may have their emails barred from sending an email to younger students. 

2. Restricting communication from outside the organisation. Emails for students must be restricted from emailing outside the school organisation. This enables them to be safe from spamming, phishing or hacking. The school may white list some domains for example if it is a sister school for collaboration purposes. 

3. Bad word list- The bad word list can be enabled to quarantine, reject or modify any email that may contain words deemed bad. 

4. Blocking students from sending emails to email distribution lists ensures that students do not send bad things to their peers. 

5. Google vault- this can be used to retrieve and search emails from any user, especially where there may be allegations of misuse or cyber-criminal activities. 

6. Email forwarding to personal accounts may be disabled too. 

All these rules may be adjusted to different grades differently. Thanks to the OU feature in the google admin console.  Stricter organisational rules enable the safety of our children from the marauding criminals whose modus operandi has now shifted to online. 

Bothwell is an Educational technology and integration specialist, Math and Computer science teacher, administrator and lecturer. Has expert knowledge in Google app script, python, web development and several applications.  He writes articles and makes videos on education and technology and is an educational consultant. 

For feedback and details please email  bothwell.riside@gmail.com.