Crazy Idea #13

I have a grandson who started kindergarten this year. It would be great to see how he interacts with his teacher and classmates without having to visit the classroom. Almost all schools have security cameras (but usually none in the classrooms). I wonder what the feasibility of marketing to schools for classroom use would be. The WyzeCams would help with teachers accountability, could be used to review classroom disruptions, and would allow parents and guardians access to their child’s educational experience. They could also be used to stream a sporting event or a School Board meeting. The cost for a school to implement one in every classroom would be pennies compared to what they already pay for their existing security systems. This idea however, would not be without its critics or without it’s “issues”. There may be installation, management, and maintenance issues as well as privacy concerns. Viewing rights would have to be monitored, password protected and secured for privacy. Still, before you say, “That’s a crazy idea.”, I’ve seen public schools do crazier things.

that’s an interesting suggestion, i’m sure there are pros and cons to this – and it’s not all as crazy as it seems. :slight_smile:

The union would never allow remote viewing of teachers, and the school districts would never allow remote viewing of kids.

As a school psychologist in a public school system, I think this is a great idea. I regularly have to go in and observe students in their classrooms. After the observation, the teacher usually comments that the student was well behaved during the observation probably because they knew I was in there observing them. Something like the Wyzecam would be a great solution, however, as a parent, I would be concerned about privacy. Also, as an employee, I don’t think anyone would appreciate having a camera in their office so “big brother” could watch. How would you respond to that?

I could see an application for it on a short-term basis, where I would possibly go in and set up the camera for an hour in order to do the observation remotely and then go in and remove the camera.

There are some serious privacy issues associated with this, let alone security concerns…

You would need consent from all parents. The children’s privacy would be the major concern.

 

You would also also need to define a data retention policy that may go beyond the AWS storage timeframe.

I would expect that there would be different concerns for public vs. private school.

Teachers unions may not be in favor of classroom recordings. It would be easy to target someone for discipline if you could watch them every hour during their work. (We all bend minor rules at times.)

Some schools are already doing this, I saw it on Shark tank a couple weeks ago.

 

Brightwheel is preschool / daycare. They’re not in public school. This will never happen in public school.

The camera video quality is definitely good, but there is no privacy… Since there is no way to use the camera locally without their app and just using a regular app like “ip cam viewer” that simply uses RTSP, I ended up putting an SD card on it and disabling its internet access by assigning an IP that is restricted by my router…

Well, to my surprise, the camera is CHINESE intelligent and decided to change its macaddress to a new one (completely different from the one in the back label) in order to gain a new IP from my router and regain internet access.

[Mod Edit]: Fixed text formatting errors.

this is a very nice idea