Data Security in the Classroom

In today's world it is increasingly important to protect your identity.  What about the identity of your students?  Who is responsible for that?  Identity thieves are targeting schools more and more in hopes of retrieving personally identifiable information or PII.  As educators, we are custodians of that information and it is our responsibility to protect it.  When it comes to our students, the full impact may not be realized for many years, especially for those of you that teach younger grades.  It is terrible to think about the possibility of the financial future of a student being destroyed when they are in Kindergarten or 1st grade.

The school district, student information host and other service providers are obligated to protect that data as much as possible.  Firewalls and other measures are being taken to protect that data, but all the security in the world is only as strong as the weakest link in the system.  That weak link is often the end user and through that weak link most identity thieves harvest their information.

How do you make sure you are not they weak link?  There is no full proof method, but there are steps you can take to decrease the likelihood of a breach.  Here are a few to get you started.  I will provide more in future posts.

1.  Clear your desk.-We don't want to believe that someone in our classroom would be capable of stealing information about others from the teachers desk, but even before the age of computerized records students were stealing files from teachers.  Now it only takes a tap on a cellphone to have a picture of some information on multiple students.


2. Sign out.  Sign in, complete your task and sign out.  If you have to step away from your computer or out into the hallway, that brief moment they are unsupervised is a great opportunity for would be ID thieves.  In that system are names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and cities.  It only takes a few of these for someone to create/steal an identity.  This applies to your email and documents as well.


3. Don't email PII.-I know your thinking, I need to email that information to parents.  Maybe, but more than likely you don't.  Your student information system  provides parents access to all that information already.  Use the communication tools within that system.  If you must email a file that contains student PII make sure it is encrypted.  More info on encrypting files in gmail will be in a future post.  If you send it without encrypting it, it is easy for someone to forward that data to someone else.


4. Take out the trash-When you run reports in your SIS or student information system it often saves a copy into your downloads folder.  Make it a habit to delete the items in that folder and then empty the trash/deleted files on your computer.  This will make it more challenging for opportunistic thieves to access the information.

There are many other ways we can protect student data, but here are a few to get you started.  This is an ongoing struggle and will require constant vigilance, let's do our part to not be the weak point in the system when it comes to our students and data security.