Behavior, lack of engagement lead to Chat ban for freshman students
West freshmen have been barred from using Google Chat due to an increased frequency of misconduct and a lack of focus in classrooms. Administrators and teachers hope this will increase participation levels in class and cut back on inappropriate behaviors.
Unsurprisingly, freshman students have a different point of view, including Lizzie Davis.
“Freshmen reacted pretty negatively, since Chat was really convenient. Everyone was mad when they got rid of it,” she said.
Another anonymous freshman agreed that most students did not like the decision to prohibit the communication tool.
“Banning Google Chat was very annoying to students, and it added to the ‘hate’ of high school,” the student said. “My friends are sick of emailing, and Chat was much more efficient for them.”
However, administrators found that Chat use was sacrificing communication for attentiveness, according to Assistant Principal Heidi Wheaton.
“We have noticed a big decrease in student engagement in classes, and that students, particularly ninth graders, were spending a lot of time on Google Chat,” she said. “So we decided that in order to increase engagement, we wanted to take away that as a distraction. A lot of engagement depends on how much you put into it, but the fewer distractions there are, the higher the likelihood that people will focus.”
Beyond simple engagement in class, abusing Chat has been a problem, particularly among freshman students, for a number of years now.
“The transition from eighth to ninth grade can be difficult for a lot of students, and trying to learn what you have to do in high school,” Justin Hable, the freshman dean of students, said. “Once you get acclimated to high school, you can get released into some of these privileges.
English teacher Alexis Novak has noticed the communication tool being abused in classroom settings.
“A lot of the behavior tends to be around getting distracted in class with their friends. That often leads to inappropriate behavior like language use and topics that are not school appropriate,” she said. “Chromebooks are school devices, and sometimes that gets forgotten.”
Some freshman students saw the ban as a broad, punitive measure for individual problems that will continue regardless.
“Keep the student body out of individual students’ problems,” an anonymous freshman said. “If the problem is bullying, students are going to continue to get bullied outside of Google Chat.”
Criticism of Email has also given rise among the student body affected by the absence of chat.
“After a hundred messages in one Email conversation, it will delete it and start a new one,” Davis said. “This is especially annoying if you have a lot of friends, and that’s why (Google) Chat was more convenient.”
On the other hand, most staff find classrooms free of chat to be increasingly beneficial. If anything, they don’t have objections.
“We did ask for staff feedback,” Hable said. “The staff said that it would not affect their teaching without Google Chat, and a lot of teachers have Chat blocked in GoGuardian anyway.”
Novak agreed, noting the benefits of using Email over Google Chat.
“As an English teacher, I find it nice because I can teach my students how to write a proper email, which is a needed skill,” Novak said. “It is also nice that I don’t have to worry about Google Chat as a distraction. Due to the nature of the discussions on Chat, I felt like I had to monitor what they were saying. I didn’t like doing this because it was like an invasion of privacy, but I felt like I had to.”
Though the communication tool is currently unavailable to West ninth graders, its future presence remains up in the air.
“As tenth graders, hopefully this will be possible to bring back,” Wheaton said. “However, if it is a problem everywhere, Chat will not be available to anybody.”
by Phoebe Fletcher
Published December 2nd, 2024
Oshkosh West Index Volume 121 Issue III