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I’ve been reporting on kids’ mental health for more than a year now, and one concern keeps coming up in my interviews with parents and experts: school apps. Blackboard, Schoology, ClassDojo, the list goes on — these apps help teachers communicate with families, and parents and other caregivers keep track of their kids’ learning. Good, right?
Kind of.
The tools started to appear in the early 2010s but really took off in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when millions of schoolchildren were forced to adapt to learning from home, said Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online and a faculty member at Harvard Law School.
Some, like Blackboard or Google Classroom, function as “open grade books,” where parents and kids can see each assignment grade as a teacher enters it. Others, like ClassDojo, allow families to keep track of kids’ behavior at school. Still others can be used to send messages or manage extracurriculars like band or sports.
The apps are now ubiquitous — open grade book tools are in use in a majority of public and private high schools in America, Gail Cornwall reports at The Cut. These tools are an improvement over the system many millennials remember, in which students and parents might not find out about their grades until the school quarter or semester was almost over.
By that time, “Sometimes it’s too late to bring those grades up,” said Meg St-Esprit, a Pittsburgh-based journalist and content creator whose almost-13-year-old son’s middle school uses Google Classroom and PowerSchool. Now kids and parents can track their progress — and their difficulties — together.
But the apps have raised privacy concerns, with some experts fearing that sensitive data about children could fall into the hands of cybercriminals or be used to limit kids’ opportunities later on.
Others fear that by encouraging parents to monitor every fluctuation in their children’s grades, the tools are fueling an achievement-obsessed culture that can lead to stress and burnout among kids. “It can feel like you’re always plugged in,” St-Esprit said. “It can feel a little bit like hustle culture.”
School apps are helpful — and stressful
If you don’t have a school-aged child at home, you might be surprised at the sheer number of apps that contemporary education entails.
St-Esprit, who has four children including her middle-schooler, has used not just Google Classroom and PowerSchool but also Seesaw, Remind, Bloomz, ClassDojo, PowerSchool, PaySchools Central, CutTime, and TeamSnap. The notifications alone can be a time suck for parents: I received at least one during each call I made for this story.
Still, for many families, the apps are a more efficient mode of communication than,