Getting Connnected In School

Connecting personal devices at school is nearly impossible, unless you are a staff member. Students can only use provided chromebooks and laptops to connect to the school’s wifi. Should the school allow students to connect to school wifi?

Many students, like Skylar Powers (12), say that not being able to connect to the school’s wifi makes it harder. Powers says, “I want to connect to wifi so that I can be able to look up information during lunch to help with homework.” A lot of students would take advantage of this opportunity to finish homework during their lunch, or free period.

The opposing argument to this would be that students should not wait till the last minute to finish their homework. The other argument for this side is that students could borrow chromebooks from teachers during this time.

    Lauren Nimmo (11), argues that she would like to be able to work on her own laptop in order to access files that she has on her computer. This would help her work on homework at school, but also be able to take that same work home to work on. This could be helpful if you do not have wifi at home, so you could do anything online at school, and do any work offline at home.

 The opposing arguments are that it would be hard for the school to monitor what students do on their personal devices. While the school could block cites they have for their devices, it would be harder to see exactly what students have accessed.

So the question remains, should the school allow students to connect personal devices? It all depends on which side you see as more reasonable. Would it really help students do better on their school assignments? Or give them more freedom that could potentially be abused?