MS Teams Chats supervised or not

[Badaz52]

I am just wondering how many MS Teams schools allow private chats? we have put supervised chat in place but of course it is still a problem with existing chats and if our teachers start a group chat and then leave the school the group chat remains open with just students inside. I have been telling the school for a long time to turn private chat off completely as students can email teachers directly or ask questions in their teams channels but they seem very reluctant to do so despite it becoming more and more troublesome everyday even with the restrictions.

[DrCheese]

We have chat fully disabled for students - Our logic was always that if a teacher wanted to chat with a student, they could use the class team to do so, or email directly.

 

I didn't want to deal with the potential safeguarding nightmare of students chatting on a school system & then having to pull the logs which aren't the greatest to go through.

[Badaz52]

We have chat fully disabled for students - Our logic was always that if a teacher wanted to chat with a student, they could use the class team to do so, or email directly.

 

I didn't want to deal with the potential safeguarding nightmare of students chatting on a school system & then having to pull the logs which aren't the greatest to go through.

 

My thoughts exactly. Having the private chat function was invaluable during the pandemic but now we are back to full time teaching it is completely unnecessary and a safeguarding nightmare.

[psydii]

We have it open. We have a deep seated culture for student self monitoring etc, and modelling expected behaviors. We also have communication compliance running which catches a dozen or so chats a day some of which get flagged to the relevent SLT or into the DSL team. Between that, quarantine management, alerts through the defender dashboard, and reviewing the prevent webfilter reports, we typically spend an hour a day on data protection/safeguarding.

 

I did look very closely into supervised chats - I was hoping that we could have it so the initiator of any chat was the supervisor (i.e. students could still start a chat), and implement an education programme based around the initiating student taking responsibility for the content of any given group/1:1 chat they initiated, but unfortunately it seems to have been designed for the more common case where only staff can initiate chat once the feature is enabled. That it could not retrospectively apply to exiting chats was also a problem. As for staff leavers... the chat would be unsupervised, but if a problem had been reported (or picked up with Communication Compliance) we could quickly re-animate the leaver's account to intervene (we could also just check leavers account for chat groups that need to be closed as part of their off-boarding experience).

[CHiLL]

It's been a hot minute since I've looked at those settings in Teams, but I'm fairly certain we disabled the chat function to disable direct or group chats. As for chats within meetings, we specified that a lobby must be used when staff configure a meetings, meaning that users are dumped out of the meeting when it's ended. However, if the member of staff doesn't end the meeting, then users are left in and can still chat, which would then be unsupervised. At the time, this couldn't be specified as a default option, so it became policy when using Teams and those that failed to do it (and presumably got caught or found out) would be dealt with by normal school procedures.

[psydii]

but now we are back to full time teaching it is completely unnecessary and a safeguarding nightmare.

 

Whenever I have done an investigation 95% of chat on Teams is about school work, and 4% of the rest is complaints that they've got a supply teacher again (fair).

 

Our frequent flyers are already on the safeguarding radar, and having them on Teams gives us valuable information to support them.

 

Once a year or so somebody/a group cross a line with their behavior (typically bullying) and land themselves with a ban or an exclusion. (and this was true way back when they had email and no chat).

[DrCheese]

We have it open. We have a deep seated culture for student self monitoring etc, and modelling expected behaviors. We also have communication compliance running which catches a dozen or so chats a day some of which get flagged to the relevent SLT or into the DSL team. Between that, quarantine management, alerts through the defender dashboard, and reviewing the prevent webfilter reports, we typically spend an hour a day on data protection/safeguarding.

 

I did look very closely into supervised chats - I was hoping that we could have it so the initiator of any chat was the supervisor (i.e. students could still start a chat), and implement an education programme based around the initiating student taking responsibility for the content of any given group/1:1 chat they initiated, but unfortunately it seems to have been designed for the more common case where only staff can initiate chat once the feature is enabled. That it could not retrospectively apply to exiting chats was also a problem. As for staff leavers... the chat would be unsupervised, but if a problem had been reported (or picked up with Communication Compliance) we could quickly re-animate the leaver's account to intervene (we could also just check leavers account for chat groups that need to be closed as part of their off-boarding experience).

 

I used to hold the same view, that we be liberal and allow everything - Even social media.

 

But over time, unfortunately, our liberal approach started causing a real headache to the day-to-day running of the school.

We recently blocked students from emailing other students, or external (Aside from P16) as 99% of what the students were sending to each other was "Cruff" and not related to Teaching & Learning. We had a few bullying instances that just wouldn't have been able to happen if the students didn't have the school-provided tools to do so.

 

It's a balancing act - It goes against my nature to block stuff off but it's made a difference.

[Badaz52]

I used to hold the same view, that we be liberal and allow everything - Even social media.

 

But over time, unfortunately, our liberal approach started causing a real headache to the day-to-day running of the school.

We recently blocked students from emailing other students, or external (Aside from P16) as 99% of what the students were sending to each other was "Cruff" and not related to Teaching & Learning. We had a few bullying instances that just wouldn't have been able to happen if the students didn't have the school-provided tools to do so.

 

It's a balancing act - It goes against my nature to block stuff off but it's made a difference.

 

Students will always find a way but to provide them with a tool to do it when there are other options just seems the wrong way to go. Common sense has to prevail at some point, we have had instances of teachers being woken up at 2am because a student has sent them a private message on teams, I mean that just can't be happening.

[psydii]

I used to hold the same view, that we be liberal and allow everything - Even social media.

 

....

 

It's a balancing act - It goes against my nature to block stuff off but it's made a difference.

 

Yeah. For now the argument that its better to see it happen where we can investigate and respond is still winning, but it would only take a couple of new SLT with a weak understanding of the culture of the school for it to flip overnight.

[psydii]

Students will always find a way but to provide them with a tool to do it when there are other options just seems the wrong way to go. Common sense has to prevail at some point, we have had instances of teachers being woken up at 2am because a student has sent them a private message on teams, I mean that just can't be happening.

 

Teachers are not expected to install Teams/school email on their personal devices. If they choose to, then they should apply the working hours features built into Teams and modern smart phone operating systems.

[Badaz52]

Teachers are not expected to install Teams/school email on their personal devices. If they choose to, then they should apply the working hours features built into Teams and modern smart phone operating systems.

 

Our teachers are not expected to either but as much of Teams is user choice, even if we told them how to do it they wouldn't, this is where the problem lies both students and staff are not using it properly. We have tried prevention/education but it looks like we now need a cure and total removal of the chat function is looking increasingly likely.

[Olliedawg]

Our private chat is enabled. Students are however not able to create their own groups/teams, not able to delete/edit any sent messages..

 

We did disable private chat a while back & lots of teachers complained! So decision was overturned by SLT & I was asked to reinstate the chat. In my 3 years at the school, I have only ever had to ban 1 student from teams chat.

[psydii]

if we told them how to do it they wouldn't, this is where the problem lies

 

That feels like a management problem, and likely not confined to the IT space. I've been lucky, I'm allowed to tell teachers what to do*, and (generally) am well supported in doing so. Some teachers have felt the consequence of not following my direction/guidance.

 

If your SLT accept that teachers wont do as directed, I fear there are problems here wider than IT, and altering student behavior will be equally fraught.

 

 

(* lest people get the impression I have god-like powers, I *want* to tell them that they should have Teams and Outlook on their phones, and make use of the downtime features to suppress notifications outside of their preferred working hours. However this view does not have the support needed within the SLT, and so I advised that they CAN (if they wish) have Teams and Outlook on their phones, but they *SHOULD* make use of downtime features -or fully disable notifications from the apps.)

Edited January 17, 2024 by psydii

[DrCheese]

Yeah. For now the argument that its better to see it happen where we can investigate and respond is still winning, but it would only take a couple of new SLT with a weak understanding of the culture of the school for it to flip overnight.

 

That was along the lines of our previous stance, that we'd rather see it than not - But it became a point that they were only doing the abuse because we'd given them the system to do it with.

Becomes quite hard to defend over time, especially when it was causing direct damage to students & disrupting Teaching/Learning, the argument became "Well why are we allowing them to do it in the first place?"

 

Wasn't beyond the realms that with the sheer volume of data most e-safety software produces that things ran the risk of being missed also.

[psydii]

Of course things are missed. They are missed in the playground and corridors and classrooms too. But you do what you can with the resources available and each school has to make a call how it expends those resources. We've come down on one side (for now) and you've landed on the other.