Students hiding games as doc files

[dmj]

Part of me thinks this isn't a technical problem - it's a classroom management problem and teachers need to be taking the responsibility of what students are doing with their time rather than trying to push it onto you.

 

You could apply that to a lot of technical things in schools, but it's a fairly simple fix to put appropriate measures in place to prevent it so I would say it is worth doing, plus there's also the angle that the IT team is responsible for the security of the software that is running. The example was for games, but it could equally apply to anything else they called winword.exe

Edited July 1, 2022 by dmj

[Mr.Ben]

Applocker fixed this issue in a past school.

 

You can configure it to allow everything in that's installed to the Program Files folder(s)

 

We allowed a specific filename each week to run (one week it would be dartboard.exe, the next sofa.exe and we gave the computing leads a list in advance).

 

They relayed this to students who would name their compiled exes to run them.

[mf13tch]

AppLocker works for us.

 

If you have a suite of machines where the computing lessons happen your AppLocker rulesets could be tweaked for those machines although if you have a 1>1 device deployment and pupils do Computing lessons on their own device it might be more tricky to allow exceptions.