Teacher’s Guide to Cybersecurity – Everything You Need to Know in 2019

Source: Bea Schuster, www.vpnmentor.com

The days of handwritten homework assignments, heavy printed textbooks, and mailed paper report cards are slipping away. Learning is digital in the 21st century. Students often complete their homework, communicate with classmates, check their grades, and conduct research for assignments online.

The internet speeds up students’ ability to study and instantly connects them with more information than a printed school library could possibly hold. However, the cyber world of modern education can be dangerous, both to your students and to you as a teacher.

Your Risks as a Teacher

Your students are more tech-savvy than you can possibly imagine. While many adults rely on the occasional tutorial to learn how to use a new program or application, students are digital natives. They intuitively know how to use apps, mobile devices, and online platforms, since they’ve been using them their whole lives.

This means that, with the right motivation, your students could probably figure out how to hack into your accounts. For example, if a student wasn’t satisfied with her grade, she might be able to figure out your password and change a grade or two. Similarly, a student who wanted to play a joke on you could change all the images in your PowerPoint presentation.

You need to know how to protect both yourself and your students from cyber attacks.

Cyber Safety for Students

In some cases, students might be the culprits of cybersecurity issues in your classroom, but in others, they might be the victims.

While many young people are able to easily learn digital programs and might even have some hacking skills, they still have a lot to learn about the world. They may not be savvy enough to spot every cybersecurity risk that they encounter.

As a teacher, you can both directly protect your students and teach them about cybersecurity so they can better safeguard themselves online.

How Students Put You in Danger

Even if they don’t mean to, your students could put you, your school, and their fellow students at risk with their digital habits. In this section, we’ll describe these hazards and explain how you can avoid them.

Integrating the Internet Into Your Classroom

As we discussed above, your students are often more tech-savvy than you. They probably know how to use every feature of the most popular online programs and digital devices. This could give them an enormous advantage over you if they wanted to hack into your accounts.

Your first instinct might be to completely ban digital devices in your classroom. However, this isn’t likely to work. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2018, “95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online ‘almost constantly.’”

This means that your ability to actually eliminate cell phone, tablet, or laptop use during class is very limited. Fighting digital devices in the classroom will most likely be futile and frustrating. Instead, make your students’ time online a productive part of class by integrating your students’ devices into your lessons (for more information on this, see our lesson plans).

Who’s Using Your User Accounts?

As a teacher, you probably have numerous online accounts. As well as your personal email and social media accounts, you also have multiple school and education software accounts.

Now, imagine if your students had access to all the information stored on those accounts. They could read your personal emails, change their online homework assignments and grades, look at other students’ reports, publish fake updates to your social media profiles, or hack you in many other ways.

Hacking into your accounts probably isn’t very challenging for your students. To make matters worse, many schools also don’t have great cybersecurity systems in place to help you protect your accounts.

To protect your important information from potential student hackers, it’s crucial that you understand how to protect and secure your accounts.

Below, we provide our suggestions for keeping your user accounts secure. This advice applies to your online teacher portals, personal accounts, emails, and social media platforms. We recommend that you:

• Use your school email address to create education-related accounts. This will help keep your personal email address separate from accounts students may have access to.
• Create complex passwords. Your passwords should be a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, and include numbers and symbols. These types of passwords are more difficult to guess.
• Change your passwords frequently. Experts advise switching your passwords every six months, but since that’s already most of the school year, we recommend changing your passwords every three months.
• Use a different password for each unique account. For example, the password you use for your teacher portal shouldn’t be the same as the one you use for your personal Facebook. This means that if someone guesses or hacks one password, they won’t be able to access all of your accounts.
• Check to see if your password is strong enough using a password meter, like ours. These tools calculate how difficult or easy it would be to guess or hack your password.
• Use a password manager to generate and store your passwords on your device or browser. A password manager uses a special database to create and store strong passwords so you don’t have to remember them.
• Use biometric passwords such as fingerprint access when available. These are very secure as only you can use them.
• Take advantage of strong authentication or two-factor verification when it’s available. These systems typically require you to enter both your password and a special code sent to your phone or email. Strong authentication offers the best protection for sensitive accounts like your email address or bank account. Many services offer strong authentication on an opt-in basis. Ask your service provider for help if you’re not sure how to get started.

The Internet in Your Classroom

You and your students will be online at school, so it’s vital that you know how to stay safe – and protect them. Below, we explain how.

Is Your School Network Safe?

Your school network is probably the primary way you and your students access the internet. It can also be a good way to block certain unsafe or inappropriate sites and improve your school’s cybersecurity. Unfortunately, it could also be vulnerable to breaches, which could put you and your students at risk.

There are many ways students can bypass the network and access blocked sites. As our article on this topic points out, students can use a VPN, proxy, or portable browser to get around the school network. These tools could allow them to unblock websites and load inappropriate online content while they’re in your classroom. This could be dangerous and disruptive.

Now that you’re aware of how students can get around school network blocks, you can work with technology professionals to prevent them from doing so. You can also be on the lookout for unsuitable online content students might bring into your classroom.

Furthermore, if your school network isn’t password-protected, this could make it even more unsafe. Hackers lurk on public wi-fi looking for users’ personal data and trying to take control of their devices. This could leave you, your students, and school administrators susceptible to malicious attacks.

In fact, in September 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued a PSA warning about the increasing cybersecurity risks faced by schools. The FBI stated that the widespread collection of sensitive information in schools “could present unique exploitation opportunities for criminals” and could result in “social engineering, bullying, tracking, identity theft, or other means of targeting children.”

Clearly, both you and your students face cybersecurity risks if your school network is unsecured. If your school network is open, you can work with administrators and IT professionals to make it more secure.

We recommend adding a password to your school’s wi-fi and changing it every three months. It may also be useful for the school to hire a cybersecurity professional to help set up more advanced anti-hacking systems.

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