High school student gets detention for using Firefox

TechRepublic ^ | Dec. 17, 2007 | Jay Garmon

[twntaipan]

Last week, a student at Big Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania was given detention for using Firefox on a school computer. Quoted below is the key explanation from the official detention writeup:

“Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a ‘better’ browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.”

I’m sure whether I should laugh or cry. It says so much about the state of technical education, respect for authority, what passes for civil disobedience and–of course–the all-consuming corporate hegemony of Microsoft. We live in a strange world.

Once again, hat tip to my buddy Lizard for the heads up.

[Tanniker Smith]

In our school district, that would probably get you suspended, but just because we don’t install FireFox, and students are not allowed to install software on the systems. So the suspension would not be for using Firefox per se, but for installing unauthorized software on a district computer.

This sums it up for my school as well. They can't install their own programs. No one knows where they came from and if the teacher isn't familiar with it, he/she can't judge if it is harmless or not.

[wolfcreek]

“Sonny, you get rid of the program right now!”

“We can’t spy on you or use our fancy subliminal messages unless you’re browsing with IE.”

[Rick.Donaldson]

Ah... the government USED to make us use IE. :) I use it at work as do many people. We just can’t put certain add ons in it, but it’s a “class III” software meaning that it has to be approved by our IA folks.

[Squawk 8888]

There are a lot of people out there who still think IE=WWW, and unfortunately some of them are teaching our kids.
There are also a lot of people who are functionally illiterate and many of them are teaching our kids.

the student should have closed the browser and then gone to the administration to tell them the teacher is a moron.
Waste of time. The administration of the average public school consists of morons, and on the off chance they weren't the teacher's union would prevent them from taking any action.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

The graphics displayed on firefox do not look well. If I switch to IE, they look great.

Anyone know how to fix this?

[antiRepublicrat]

Each machine must have at least one account with admin rights. As IT/admin, you log on and can create user accounts with various levels of authority. So create a generic user profile or one per student, and only give them that user name and password.

Where I was we gave everybody local admin rights. But then the machines were re-imaged over the network between classes.

[Squawk 8888]

If Hotmail supports POP and SMTP (Yahoo Mail does), you might want to try Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client. It’s available for free at the Firefox site.

[Still Thinking]

That seems like a good way to go, actually.

[antiRepublicrat]

The administration of the average public school consists of morons, and on the off chance they weren't the teacher's union would prevent them from taking any action.

Good point. I'm already waiting for when my kids come to school with their first report written on a Mac in .pages or .odf format.

[sam_paine]

With Windows as I know it,...when you login YOU are the Root user

By default, yes you can. But a competent sysadmin in a school especially, should set kids up as user-level with NO s/w install privvys.

[antiRepublicrat]

The graphics displayed on firefox do not look well. If I switch to IE, they look great.

Firefox may have shrunk large photos to fit in the window.

[Still Thinking]

"Failure to serve a Saturday morning detention results in a three day in school suspension".

Me too, at least for issues where my mom would agree with me. But apparently they caught on.

[Squawk 8888]

1) The school IT department apparently doesn’t know how to set up thier computers to prevent users from installing unauthorized software.
Around here, the schools' IT departments are staffed by the same people who used to run the AV deparments; IT is the dumping ground for burnt-out teachers who would have been fired if not for the unions.

2) The teacher in question didn’t have a clue what Firefox was, even though computers (and internet browsing) are apparently being used as a learning tool in thier class.
In most public schools the teachers don't have a clue about any of the subjects they teach.

[antiRepublicrat]

Whenever life was going a little too well, I sat down and tried to learn assembly language.

Sort of a modern version of self-flagellation? I used to do it because I needed to for the speed. I'm not going back there.

[Squawk 8888]

I got a LOT of three-day vacations using that technique :-)

[CholeraJoe]

I was having computer problems and the Director of IT came to look at my box and noticed that I was using Firefox instead of IE. He gave me a look like I had just risen a few notches in his esteem. Maybe he didn’t expect a corporate officer to have that much good sense.

[Rb ver. 2.0]

The IT dept. at my son’s,now college junior, high school hated his computer class because he and a couple of other kids could figure out system problems and get the network back to running correctly before the ink had dried on the IT work order.

[dmz]

Sort of a modern version of self-flagellation?
____________

Exactly.

[HereInTheHeartland]

Kids really shouldn’t be installing software on school computers.

[Rb ver. 2.0]

“”Failure to serve a Saturday morning detention results in a three day in school suspension”.”

The logic of that fails me.