Students shouldn’t have to trade their right to privacy in order to access their right to an education.
The use of Education Technology (EdTech) has been expanding rapidly all over the world, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
That expansion frequently hasn't been accompanied by appropriate safeguards or responsible practices, from data protection to procurement to respect for human rights - too many EdTech solutions and schools that use them are falling short of human rights protections.
We have been tracking the use of EdTech around the world to better understand the trends and shortcomings and strengthen ours and others understanding regarding these issues.
This page will be updated as we find more examples and stories about EdTech from all around the world.
With the use of ChatGPT already well established among students technology companies are coaching teachers on using AI tools to save substantial time on tasks such as grading, providing student feedback, and planning lessons, which reports say take up to 50 hours a week. Teachers are uncertain
The Los Angeles school district turned off “Ed”, a $6 million chatbot, after the company paid to develop it got into financial trouble. The incident provides a cautionary tale for Britain’s new Labour government, which has talked of using AI in schools to free up teacher time and revive public
The UK's new Labour government are giving AI models special access to the Department of Education's bank of resources in order to encourage technology companies to create better AI tools to reduce teachers' workloads. A competition for the best ideas will award an additional £1 million in
Fifty-five percent of US parents say they need financial help to buy the technology their children need for school, according to a survey conducted by EcoATM Gazelle, which sells refurbished devices. Link: [Parents are going into credit card debt buying back-to-school tech, survey says](https://qz
Like around 1,500 other school districts, Columbus City Schools, the largest school district in the US state of Ohio, has begun partnering with the Texas-based safety technology company Gaggle. Gaggle monitors students’ devices for signs of potential concerns such as self-harm, depression, or
The Delhi government is expected to introduce facial recognition in schools in order to improve attendance, which is hovering at 65-70%. The government also proposes to provide parents with monthly attendance reports and introduce monthly and weekly tests in order to keep students engaged. Educators
Schools in New Jersey and Wisconsin are installing Singlewire Software’s Visitor Aware, visitor management software that includes facial recognition and ID scanning, and collects visitors’ names, ID documents, date of birth, address, gender, and a facial photo, which it uses to check against the
An assessment camp for disabled children who attend government schools run by the Samagra Shiksha integrated scheme for education in the Indian state of Telagana required eligible children to bring with them a state government-issued disability certificate indicating a more than 40% disability, two
Google has settled a case brought in 2020 by the parents of an Illinois girl who sued the company in state court alleging that it had violated two sections of the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The case also alleged that Google had violated the law by failing to obtain parental consent to
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has reprimanded the Chelmer Valley High School in Chelmsford, Essex for unlawfully implementing facial recognition technology in its canteen. The school failed to perform a data protection information assessment, and didn't get adequate permission to
Los Angeles schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho is appointing a task force to find out what went wrong and how to move forward with an AI chatbot intended to issue advice and create individual acceleration plans for every student. The company, AllHere, has apparently collapsed financially, but
In an interview conducted by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s investigative team, Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, explained his concerns with the security and privacy aspects of the design of “Ed”, an AI chatbot intended to assist students
Los Angeles public schools have turned off an AI chatbot custom-designed to help parents and children navigate the school system after only three months because AllHere, which created it, mostly shut down. The information the chatbot dispensed is still available on the school’s platform, and the
Both global and US investment in edtech has dropped sharply since its peak in 2021, when Coursera, Udemy, and Duolingo all went public, even though both enrollment numbers and adoption of edtech are increasing. India's BYJU provides an example: valued peaked at $22 billion in 2022, in 2024 its value
Ontario allocates $30 million to install new security technologies and vape detectors, expanding their surveillance apparatus whilst contributing to an overall cut in funding per student. Some of the vape detectors installed in Canadian schools include noise detectors, however there is a lack of
The UK's Department of Education intends to appoint a project team to test edtech against set criteria to choose the highest-quality and most useful products. Extra training will be offered to help teachers develop enhanced skills. Critics suggest it would be better to run a consultation first to
The ACLU of Maine has criticised the Caribou school district and the Pennsylvania-based biometric education company IdentiMetrics for mishandling a contract by not laying out clear plans for protecting student data. The contract was to supply a biometric finger scanner to track student attendance
Skeptics at an education conference pushed parents to question AI vendors' pitches instead of gambling children's privacy for promises of increased on-campus safety. Even so, schools are increasingly upgrading surveillance systems to incorporate AI and biometrics in the name of safety. Link to
The Utah State Board of Education has approved a $3 million contract with Utah-based AEGIX Global that will let K-12 schools in the state apply for funding for AI gun detection software from ZeroEyes for up to four cameras per school. The software will work with the schools' existing camera systems
The United School Administrators of Kansas, who represent more than 2,000 administrators in the state, are partnering with Seattle-based Indicio to install its Indicio Proven product, which will issue and verify transcripts and other records with ID verification. Link to article Publication
The United School Administrators of Kansas, who represent more than 2,000 administrators in the state, are partnering with Seattle-based Indicio to install its Indicio Proven product, which will issue and verify transcripts and other records with ID verification. Link to article Publication
Numerous research efforts are developing facial recognition systems for use in classrooms. In one example, researchers at Guilford College are designing a system for classroom management that will use multiple cameras to take attendance, monitor students’ activities, and detect their emotional
The Newport-Mesa [California] Unified School District Board of Education approved a new AI-enhanced surveillance system from Everon LLC (formerly ADT Commercial) that includes automated cameras, software that can spot after-hours intruders, read car licence plates, and monitor for signs of
Some UK schools have bought and installed sensors in toilets that 'actively listen' to pupils' conversations to try to detect keywords spoken by pupils. The sensors are being sold to detect vaping, bullying, and other problems. However, privacy campaigners say these sensors are potentially a
A platform that will serve as a central data repository for India's One Nation One Student ID is due to start operation in February 2024. The 12-digit student ID (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) is liked to students' Aadhaar biometric IDs and has so far been issued to 20 million
The data protection officer for Rhineland-Pfalz says that parental agreement is not required when schools use ChatGPT, even when the students are underage. However, the terms and conditions attached to OpenAI’s licence for third parties for ChatGPT say parents must give consent. Link: Datenschützer
Schools in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana, are using facial recognition to take morning attendance. Telangana is also using facial recognition to pay pensions, renew driving licences, evoting, and deter crime. Adoption was partly fueled by fear of spreading covid-19 through
The 746 KGBV schools in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh say the schools’ facial recognition attendance system has helped improve both students’ and teachers’ attendance. KGBVs are residential schools intended to educate girls from impoverished backgrounds. Link: Face-recognition Tech helps KGBV in
The New York State Department of Education has prohibited schools in New York State from purshasing or using facial recognition technology. Schools can use other types of biometric identifying technology as long as they consider the privacy implications. Article: New York State bans facial
New research shows that schools' scramble to adopt new technologies in schools have given for-profit companies a massive opening into the data of young people's everyday lives and created an $85 billion industry that has brought security and privacy risks for all concerned. Schools, meanwhile, lack
Google is working to extend the lifespan of Chromebooks by providing software updates for up to a decade. The new policy, which will begin in 2024, will ensure that no current Chromebook expires in the next two years. The expiration dates were proving expensive for schools, which were having to
The facial recognition system the Indian state of Telangana intends to adopt for taking attendance in schools will be AI-enhanced, eliminate the paper register via an Android app, serve 2.6 million students in 26,000 schools, and be extended to teachers after it has been successfully implemented for
An app used by more than 100 Bristol schools has raised concern among criminal justice and anti-racism campaigners that the easy access it gives safeguarding leads to pupils' and their families' contacts with police, child protection, and welfare services risks increasing discrimination against
Chromebooks, which many schools purchased at the beginning of the pandemic because of their lower cost compared to PCs and Macs, are proving expensive as their prices rise, the cost of repairs bites, and Google's expiration policy means many models are about to become e-waste. A study from US PIRG
An investigation finds that using search tools provided by the College Board, the organisation that administers SATs and Advanced Placement exams for university-bound students, prompts it to send details of SAT scores, grade point averages, and other data to Facebook, TikTik, and other companies via
Fairplay and the Center for Digital Democracy are asking the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google and YouTube are violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the terms of a 2019 settlement agreement by serving children personalised ads on videos labelled "made for
Following a report from Human Rights Watch, The Public Ministry of São Paolo began an investigation to find out whether government education platforms and services collected students' personal data and sent it to adtech companies in violation of the General Data Protection Law. Article: São Paolo
Education experts and publishers in Brazil are warning of the negative consequences of a decision by the São Paolo state government to replace textbooks with ebooks for students over 14 starting in 2024. Many students have no Internet access, and publishers argue it will irreparably damage the
UK government ministers are seeking to ensure schools benefit financially from any future use of pupils’ data by large language models such as those behind ChatGPT and Google Bard. Data from the national pupil database is already available to third-party organisations. The BCS head of education
Students and teachers in the Indian state of Telangana will probably have to use facial recognition to register their attendance despite privacy concerns voiced by the Internet Freedom Foundation. Under Indian law, children cannot give consent themselves, and parents must be informed. According to tender documents, the app is required to take photos of the class and generate a list, with images, of absent students.
According to police plans to enhance “school safety”, security cameras and facial recognition will monitor children in Hong Kong in class and around educational facilities. The move is part of a trend also found in China, India, and the US toward mining children’s data, even though few benefits have
Wisconsin schools use a racially discriminatory Dropout Early Warning System built by the state to identify incoming 9th graders who may be at risk of failing to graduate on time in order to offer them help. The system’s machine learning algorithms make their assessments based on test scores
The Court of Appeals for British Columbia rejected the claim made by whistleblower Ian Linkletter that linking to freely available materials from the remote proctoring company Proctorio was legitimate criticism. The company has a history of attacking those who criticise it and its products
Following pilots in Nirmal and Jayashankar Bhupalpally districts, the government of the Indian state of Telangana is planning on adopting facial recognition software to manage attendance in the schools. Officials have said the system should ensure every transaction is transparent and traceable and
Data-driven wellbeing audits are becoming common in classrooms in Denmark, which has long invested heavily in digital teaching aids and interactive learning. In the last few decades, depression among Danish children has sextupled, and a quarter of ninth-graders report having attempted self-harm
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using an obscure administrative subpoena called “1509”, intended for use only in criminal investigation about illegal imports or unpaid customs duty. Most requests have sought records from telecommunications companies, technology firms, money transfer
Human Rights Watch called on the national government of Brazil to amend the country's data protection law to add new safeguards to protect children online following the discovery that seven educational webistes directed at Brazilian students, including two created by state education secretariats
The Office of the Information Commissioner has warned Scotland's North Ayrshire council that it has likely infringed data protection law by using facial recognition technology in nine schools. North Ayrshire used the iPayimpact contactless system for payment for meals, and claimed that 97% of
Months after a District Court judgment that Cleveland State University violated student privacy in requiring the use of an online proctoring service that required a scan of students' rooms, some professors California colleges were still using such software for remote exams. Privacy rights
The UK Information Commissioner's Office has reprimanded North Ayrshire council for installing iPayimpact facial recognition technology in nine schools without obtaining adequate consent. The system was intended to speed cashless lunch payments. The council withdrew the system and deleted the data
A security flaw in the mandatory "Diksha" app operated by the Education Ministry, which became an important tool for giving students access to coursework while at home during the pandemic, exposed the data of millions of Indian students and teachers for more than a year when a cloud server hosted on
The Mississippi legislature has introduced a bill that would require public schools and postsecondary institutions to install video surveillance cameras that record audio throughout their campuses, including in classrooms, auditoriums, cafeterias, gyms, hallways, recreational areas, and along each
In a preliminary ruling, the administrative court of Montreuil suspended the use of algorithmic e-proctoring software called TestWe after students at the Institute of Distant Study of the University of Paris 8 brought a legal case, assisted by La Quadrature du Net. The plaintiffs argued that the
The pro-Ukrainian hacker group NLB Team leaked the personal data of more than 17 million children and parents who used Moscow Electronic School, an online learning platform that was built by the Moscow city government in 2016 and was its primary method of delivery online education during the covid
In an unprecedented interim ruling, a student has provided sufficient facts to uphold a complaint that the Free University discriminated against her when its anti-cheating algorithm failed to log her in via face detection, likely due to the darker colour of her skin. The university has ten weeks to
In a report, the Privacy Coimmissioner of Canada has said that online proctoring tools used to conduct remote exams fail to get sufficiently free, clear, and individual consent from students. Besides this overreach, the report identifies factors that may trigger false alerts and errors in the
The French minister of national education and youth has advised schools not to use the free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace because French public procurement contracts require payment. Paid versions may be allowed if they do not violate data protection rules, including a 2020
In a report, the Center for Democracy and Technology finds that student privacy laws are insufficient to protect students in the face of increasing use of remote education technologies and insufficient staff and other resources. CDT examined the practices of 43 local education authorities and their
German data protection authorities have ruled that the use of Microsoft Office 365 in schools is not compliant with GDPR, citing a lack of transparency around how and where Microsoft processes and stores student data as well as the potential for third-party access. German federal and state data
Ohio teenager Aaron Ogletree has won a lawsuit he filed against Cleveland State University after he was required to pan a webcam around his bedroom to eliminate possible cheating before taking a remote exam. The court agreed that Ogletree's Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the scanning
At least 37 US colleges and universities, as well as numerous school district, have repurposed Social Sentinel (recently renamed Navigate360 Detect) to help campus police surveil student protests. The software is marketed as a safety tool that can scan students' social media posts and university
US parents have reported receiving an explicit and deliberately shocking image after hackers attacked the primary school learning app Seesaw. Seesaw has 10 million users, who include teachers, students, and family members. The company said the hackers had not gained administrative access, but had
In September 2022, the UK Department for Education announced that under a £270,000 contract with Suffolk-based Wonde Ltd it would collect data on children's school attendance and potentially share it with other government departments and third parties as part of its drive to raise attendance. A
A US federal judge has ruled in the case Ogiltree v. Cleveland State University that "room scans", the common requirement in remotely proctored exams to provide a 360-degree scan of the area in which students are taking tests, are an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. Often these areas
During a remotely proctored online exam, a number of students on the Bar Professional Training Course urinated in bottles and buckets and wore adult diapers rather than risk the possibility that their exam would be terminated if they left their screens long enough to go to the toilet. The Bar
The 32-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act is failing to protect neurodivergent students from school monitoring and risk assessment software that treats any divergence from stereotypically "normal" behaviour as a harm to both the students themselves and others. Remote proctoring software
Even though schools are back in session in person, their teachers can still monitor the screens on their school-issued devices via software such as GoGuardian. In a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89% of teachers say their schools will continue to use student-monitoring
In a report, the UK's Digital Futures Commission warns that the explosion of use of education technology brings risks to children's privacy, especially that the data it collects, much of it personally identifiable, will be entered into the heavily commercial global data ecosystem, with uncertain
The Welsh Local Government Association is collaborating with the Centre for Digital Public Services on an 8-to-12-week discovery project to help local authorities to understand schools' requirements for information management systems and understand the market offerings in order to formulate a needs
Following the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that paved the way for states to enact legislation criminalising abortion, health advocates warn that the surveillance software schools use to algorithmically monitor students' messages and search terms could be weaponised against teens looking for
A report finds that most of the education technology endorsed by 49 governments in the rush to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic puts at risk or directly violates the privacy and rights of children for purposes unrelated to their education. Such platforms track children across the
After an in-person auction in São João let Brazilian technology companies bid for a contract to supply facial recognition technology to the public school system. PontoID, which won the $162,000 contract, began secretly rolling out the technology without informing parents or students in advance. The
Intel, in partnership with the software company Classroom Technologies, has developed an AI facial analysis system ("Class") by training an algorithmic model based on labels psychologists applied to the emotions they could detect in videos of students in real-life classrooms. The software is
A student in Minneapolis was outed when their parents were contacted by school administrators when surveillance software found LGBTQ keywords in their writing on a school-supplied laptop. The risk of many more such cases is increasing as the use of edtech spread, fuelled by the pandemic, and
An increasingly broad range of US government agencies - including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Social Security Administration, and the departments of Agriculture, Education, and Housing and Urban Development - are able to break into encrypted phones and copy their data using technology
The Nigerian startup uLesson, which began by offering pre-recorded lessons on dongles, now delivers livestreamed interactive video classes to learners in a number of African countries as well as the US and UK. One of uLesson's investors is Tencent, which also backed at least three Chinese EdTech
The Indian online educational services company Byju, which sells a live online one-on-one learning platform in the US, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, has aggressive plans to expand in the US and is seeking acquisitions there and in the UK and Australia. In 2021, it acquired the digital reading
A new report from the education news site The 74 Million finds that in-school digital surveillance programs are flagging LGBTQ+ content as "pornographic". For example, Gaggle, comprehensive monitoring software implemented in the Minneapolis public school system, has led administrators to notify
A new report finds that monitoring software is in wide use in US K-12 schools, and that teachers, parents, and students generally believe the benefits outweigh the risks while still expressing some privacy and equity concerns. The authors recommend transparency, data minimisation, and mitigation of
Since launching its The Learning App in 2015, the Indian EdTech company Byju's had grown to serve more than 80 million users and 5.5 million paid subscribers by 2021; it provides learning programs for students aged four years old and up. However, former employees say that underpinning the company's
Teachers and staff members at state primary and upper primary schools across the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are protesting the requirement that they use a digital attendance system to log their entry and exit times. Among the problems: the system was introduced without a trial period to solve
Public documents show that US school districts have for years been buying phone cracking tools from companies like Cellebrite and Oxygen Forensics. The equipment enables school district employees to search students’ personal devices. In one example, the Los Angeles Unified School District says its
A 12-year-old boy and his parent worked out how to game the grading algorithm used by the testing software Edgenuity by including a list of keywords alongisde two full sentences in responses to short-answer questions. Students at others of the more than 20,000 schools that use Edgenuity use this and
The Focus1, or FuSi, from the US-based startup BrainCo, claims to measure how closely students are paying attention via electrodes that detect brain activity and send the data to teachers’ computers or a mobile app. Lights on the headband glow red, yellow, or blue to signify the level of engagement
A coalition of 33 civil rights, disabilities, privacy, and education advocacy groups are pushing the state of Florida to stop developing the Florida Schools Safety Portal, a database of detailed information about students for the claimed purpose of preventing school shootings, calling it a "massive
English school head teachers were asked to fill out a census form designed in partnership with the Department of Education and hosted by Capita that included fields asking for pupils’ asylum status, ethnicity, and passport numbers and export dates. Families are meant to be advised it’s not mandatory
The UK’s education watchdog, Ofsted, is considering checking pupils’ and parents’ social media pages to ensure that schools maintain their standards. Privacy campaigners oppose the plan as overreach, while representatives of teachers’ unions warned the information would be unreliable. https://inews
Experiments with personalised technology-mediated learning have been successful in the controlled environment of charter schools, but now must prove their worth in traditional district schools with much larger class sizes, more rigid schedules, long-established teaching and learning cultures, and
The Innovation Academy in Sunrise, Arizona, is experimenting with offering 90 sixth through eighth-graders self-paced computerised lessons that generate data four teachers can use to monitor their progress, spot students who need help, and develop small-group activities. Key to the programme is
Many US schools give students tablets, but the key to their successful use is providing data plans. The US's "homework gap" is the lack of at-home Internet access that keeps many children from being able to use the benefit from the many investments in edtech that are being made. In a new intiative
The spread of edtech has not, as hoped, levelled the playing field but widened the gap in skills between children of affluence and children of poverty, a new study finds. Removing problems of access - for example, by placing computers in public libraries - doesn't solve this because given access
While the edtech sector continues to grow - projections are that it will reach US$132.4 billion globally by 2032 - the educational value of edtech remains unknown and may even be negative. Tech developers should collaborate with scientists who study learning in order to create more effective designs
In a 2010 case, the Lower Merion school district in suburban Philadelphia school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who had discovered that the webcams attached to their school-issued laptops had secretly taken hundreds of photographs of them in their homes
Parents and teachers of students enrolled in the São Paolo state education network report that the Minha Escola SP app was auto-installed without permission on the phones of students at state schools and their guardians in order to increase student engagement and family participation. The Department of Education is investigating the circumstances.
