What I got from the school parent-teacher meeting.
The school is planning to change their digital school systems into a more centralized management system that lets students, teachers and parents access to their respective dashboards.
They divided their management system into 4 main parts.
Portals and communication Data dashboard Calendar system Artificial Intelligence
Let's go through each of them!
Portals and communication
Portals are basically a way for students, teachers and parents to access their dashboards.
The school mentions that the current system is very fragmented and is difficult to manage so they are combining everything from schedules, calendars, announcements and all these stuff into one central system.
This new portal that they are making is with a U.K. based company called “Finalsite” which habdles the hosting and web development for the school. They are handling both the website and the mobile app version.
Everything sounds cool, yeah? Well, Finalsite announced in 2020 that they have moved their entire hosting facilities to Google Cloud Hosting. Oof.
Basically, all private data of students, teachers and parents are stored in Google Cloud. Does this system depends on big tech? Absolutely.
Data Dashboard
Data dashboard is a part of the portal that shows students' data for teachers and parents. The data contains: students' academic performaces (grades), extracurricular performance and announcements.
The dashboard is made by AppsEvents which is a “dedicated Google Education partner”. Another reliance on big tech? Clearly yes!
Calendar System
For the calendar system, they use a system called SOCS which is something I have used before. It can be buggy in some ways but I guess that is probably how the school configures their stuff.
Artificial Intelligence
We are now on this infamous topic. A.I. in schools. Now so far, we have seen that the two parts of the management system will be relying on Google services, but the reliance on big tech is about to increase even more.
The school stated that they will be integrating artificial intelligence to the school learning system, that sounds pretty cool, however as it turns out...
With the new dashboards, they are bringing A.I. into the main website page... as a chatbot. Yes, a chatbot. Powered by Poe which is then based on Google Gemini. You know, the A.I. that labeled a wild poisonous mushroom as a safe and edible musbroom or the A.I. that suggests people adding “non-toxic glue” to get the cheese to stick to the pizza.
This new chatbot is mainly used for answering general questions about the school like announcements, uniforms and so on.
However, they have said that they will be integrating A.I. into their learning systems as time goes on. They have stated their ethos towards A.I. as:
A.I. is not a school priority; it shapes the school's priorities.
The school also stated that they are not plastering A.I. onto everything just for the sake of marketing. (which I don't really agree with LOL)
They did not specify on how A.I. will be used in the school learning ecosystem but we'll have to see.
Okay... what have we learned here. We have learned that the school digital learning system is almost entirely based on Google service. They are 90% reliant on big tech infrastructure, this also includes email, file storage and more.
This creates privacy concerns (which most people do not really care) as the school is storing their entire school data on a public company's server infrastructure which is basically giving ownership of their data to a big tech company! How cool is that!?
Am I worried about this change? Yes, absolutely. Can I do anything about this? No.