School Tech & Student Data Watch

Why this is recommended

A PowerSchool breach that exposed a child's records, a phone ban that starts Monday, a free hotspot program, or a monitoring tool that flags a teenager's search history are each things a parent should hear the week they happen, and the Tab reads the notices districts bury.

What the Tab covers

Who it is for

The 50 million families with a child in school and the teachers running the classroom on these tools.

When it runs

Districts and ed-tech vendors post policy and incident notices mid-week; parents ask at Thursday pickup

Scope

PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Clever, ClassDojo, Seesaw, Khan Academy, IXL, Zearn, Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly, Bark, Lightspeed and Turnitin breaches, outages, policies and prices; district and state AI, phone and device policies; FERPA, COPPA and state student privacy laws and enforcement; free device and internet programs; Common App, College Board, ACT and Naviance outages; Chromebook and iPad program changes

Suggested task

The objective your Tab starts with. You can edit every line of it once the Tab is yours.

Ed-tech breaches and outages affecting students, district AI and device policies, classroom platform price and feature changes, student data privacy laws and enforcement, school phone bans and device rules by state, free and discounted device and internet programs for students, monitoring software and surveillance rule changes and college application and testing platform outages, with the vendor, district or state first.

Track school technology and student data in the United States. Report only confirmed, source-backed items from the last 7 days: breaches, outages and enforcement actions at PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Clever, ClassDojo, Seesaw, Khan Academy, IXL, Zearn, Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly, Bark, Lightspeed and Turnitin, with what parents and teachers should do; district AI, phone, device and monitoring policies in the 50 largest districts and state phone ban laws with effective dates; ed-tech price, feature and data policy changes; FERPA, COPPA and state student privacy law changes and enforcement; free and discounted device, hotspot and internet programs for students; Common App, College Board, ACT and Naviance outages during deadlines; and Chromebook and iPad program changes. Prefer district and state education agency notices, vendor security pages, FTC and Department of Education releases and established education reporting; ignore rumors and unverified parent posts. Put the vendor, district or state first in the title with the date. Use high severity for a breach exposing student records, a phone or device rule taking effect within 14 days, or a platform outage during an application deadline. Return no more than 6 findings. Push each as a finding with a title, a two-sentence summary, sections for what happened, who is affected, what to do, the date, and the source link. If nothing qualifies, push nothing and submit the run receipt.