Lake Forest Country Day School (LFCDS)
Information Technology
Student Responsible Use Policy
updated 11-November-2011
Use
Honor Code
This policy is an application of the principles embedded in the LFCDS Honor Code to the use of LFCDS information technology resources by its students. It clarifies the boundaries of responsible use but cannot be entirely exhaustive in their enumeration. Therefore, the LFCDS Honor Code principles remain applicable guideposts regardless of the specifics here set forth.
Educational Mission
LFCDS computing and communications resources are provided to advance the school’s educational mission of “Inspired teaching, academic rigor, attention to individual needs, [and] commitment to responsible citizenship.” Educational uses of information technology resources have highest priority and supersede other uses.
Access
Students
Each Lake Forest Country Day School student receives access to LFCDS computer and communication resources for academic use while enrolled at LFCDS according to the schedule below and subject to the provisions of this Responsible Use Policy. Access remains active during the academic year while students are currently enrolled at LFCDS and remain in good disciplinary standing.
- Shared LFCDS Network Login account: Grade JK-Grade 3
- Panther Portal extranet accounts: Grade 2 & above
- Individual LFCDS Network Login accounts: Grade 4 & above
- LFCDS SkyDrive & SkyMail accounts: Grade 5 & above
- ePAL Tablet PCs: Grade 5 & above
Network accounts allow access to the software and services outlined in the Services section from any student-access LFCDS computer.
Parents
Each parent of any currently enrolled student receives a Panther Portal extranet account allowing access to information about his or her child. Accounts remain active during the academic year while students are currently enrolled at Lake Forest Country Day School. While on campus, parents may also request from the IT Service Center the security key to access the Internet via the LFCDS guest WiFi network.
Services
Scope
LFCDS offers students access to a variety of internal network services such as file sharing, printing, as well as a subset of Internet services, including filtered World Wide Web and File Transfer Protocol access. Lake Forest Country Day School uses Microsoft Windows 7 as its standard end-user workstation operating system. While the school uses a breadth of general-purpose and specialty software packages, it makes heavy use of Microsoft Office 2010 applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Families wishing to maintain a compatible computer environment in the home are encouraged to provide a file-format compatible office productivity suite, such as Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 for Windows, Microsoft Office 2008:mac or 2011:mac, or the latest version of the freely available OpenOffice.
Requests for Additional Services
Requests for access to additional services necessary for school-related purposes should be submitted to the IT Department, which will evaluate the security and support implications of the request and approve or deny the request accordingly.
Prohibited Activities
The following uses are disallowed:
Illegal activities,
including violation of state and federal law, including violation of software license agreements, violation of copyright law, attempting to break into restricted areas. As with other illegal activities, Lake Forest Country Day School may coordinate with law enforcement authorities on suspected violations of law.
Violation of the LFCDS Honor Code,
including any activity not in line with the values expressed in the Honor Code, especially accessing network sites with pornography, obscenity, or content that demeans others.
Cyberbullying and Harassment,
including threatening or offensive communication, as defined in the Bulletin of Information and elsewhere.
Academic dishonesty,
including plagiarism and cheating, as delineated elsewhere in the Bulletin of Information.
Non-School Use
Students may use computers only for school-related activities. Playing video games and Web “surfing” are disallowed during the academic school day. Students may only use LFCDS storage space for academic files, not for personal collections of documents, audio or video files, or programs.
Private on-line communication with strangers,
outside the supervision of a parent or LFCDS staff member is considered unsafe and inappropriate.
Damage
to equipment, software, or data not owned by the user, including physical breakage, electronic corruption or erasure, and/or creating or distributing viruses or other destructive programs. Students will be held accountable and financially responsible for missing equipment or damaged equipment resulting from negligence or intentional destruction or misuse of equipment.
Violation of security,
including not protecting passwords, stealing passwords, not complying with password guidelines, using another's account without the permission and supervision of a school employee, allowing another the use of your account without the permission and supervision of a school employee, leaving your account unlocked while not attended, attempting to break into restricted areas, attempting to circumvent system restrictions, and distributing restricted information.
Violation of privacy,
including monitoring others' communications and viewing others' documents without permission.
Impeding others' use
of computing resources, including overuse of network, and creating or distributing viruses or other destructive programs.
System Modification,
including physically opening or otherwise tampering with equipment, and reconfiguring or installing software, except by permission of the IT Department.
Interconnection of unauthorized devices
to Lake Forest Country Day School computing equipment, including the network, other than those devices provided by the school or user-provided USB flash drive for the purpose of transferring user files. These devices may only be connected if the device will not interfere with the normal operation of the computer or the network.
Disallowed Systems
To protect the integrity of the Lake Forest Country Day School network, the IT Department reserves the right to disallow installation of, use of, or access to any hardware, software, or network service. The following systems may not be installed on or accessed through Lake Forest Country Day School computers or networks except by the IT Department in service of official school business.
Peer-to-peer file sharing systems:
Due to the legal issues surrounding copyright violations and the overwhelming strain such file sharing services put on our Internet connection and storage space, peer-to-peer file sharing software and services such as Napster, Morpheus, KaZaA, BearShare, Gnutella, etc., are disallowed.
Network Analyzers:
Due to the potential for stealing passwords and invading privacy, network protocol analyzers ("packet sniffers") such as Sniffer, EtherPeek, Ethereal, etc.) are disallowed.
Proxy Servers:
Due to the potential to bypass Lake Forest Country Day School network security controls, proxy and other tunneling servers are disallowed.
Remote Desktop Clients:
Due to the potential to bypass Lake Forest Country Day School network security controls, remote desktop clients (Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC, GoToMyPC, ZeroPC, LogMeIn, TeamViewe) and similar software are disallowed.
Network Intrusion Tools:
Due to the potential to inflict harm on Lake Forest Country Day School or other networks, network intrusion, attack, and cracking tools are disallowed.
Crackware:
Due to the potential to violate copyright laws, tools that disable or generate activation/license codes for software applications are disallowed. Software that has been so "cracked" is also disallowed.
Game Console Emulators:
Game Console Emulators allow games for such systems as Nintendo, PlayStation, GameBoy, etc. to be played on a personal computer. The ROM images containing the game code are copyrighted by their respective owners and protected by software license agreements that forbid use without the user owning the actual game. The process for determining legal ownership and regulating execution of game ROMs in order to maintain compliance with copyright laws and software licensing agreements would pose an overwhelming administrative burden on the IT Department. Therefore, Game Console Emulators are disallowed.
Real-time Communication Programs:
Unsupervised used of real-time communication programs such as instant messaging, chat, and audio/video conferencing programs are disallowed for students because of the distraction they pose and the potential for unsupervised contact with strangers.
Electronic Mail:
Due to the potential for distraction, harassment, and unsupervised contact with strangers, students may not access electronic mail through the LFCDS network or computers except as noted in the Communication section.
Accessing Filtered Internet Sites
While Lake Forest Country Day School is exempt from the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), it chooses to filter World Wide Web content for the protection of its students. Specifically, LFCDS filters all content considered obscene (as defined in section 1460 of title 18 of the United State code or harmful to minors, taken to mean any content that (a) appeals to prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion (b) depicts, describes, or represents, in an offensive way with respect to what is suitable to minors, an sexual act, content, or lewd exhibition, and (c) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to minors. Additional content deemed inappropriate such as gaming, shopping, social networking, media streaming, and anonymous communications are blocked at the school’s discretion. Users may not attempt to circumvent content restrictions. Requests for modifications to filtered sites for school-related purposes may be made to the Director of Information Technology, who will confer with the appropriate academic division head to approve or disallow access.
Commercial use,
without the express written permission of the Head of School.
Political lobbying,
without the express written permission of the Head of School.
Other restricted activities,
as promulgated by the IT Department and LFCDS administration.
Communication & Publishing
Content
Students must communicate only in ways that are appropriate and respectful. All messages must comply with the LFCDS Honor Code and not violate the rules outlined under Prohibited Activities or elsewhere in this policy
All communication posted by or conveyed through LFCDS computing and communications equipment should comply with commonly accepted standards of network etiquette (“netiquette”), including avoidance of spamming, flaming, and sending chain letters and the general netiquette guidelines presented in such articles as Internet RFC 1855 and Virginia Shea's book, Netiquette.
Electronic Mail (SkyMail)
Recipients
Students may only send messages to LFCDS employees, LFCDS students, and other LFCDS-approved recipients and only for academic purposes.
Distribution Group Use
Only authorized users may send messages to the LFCDS E-mail Distribution Groups.
Forwards
In keeping with accepted standards of respect and courtesy, students may forward or re-post e-mail written by another member of the LFCDS community only with that person's consent.
Attachments
Attachments should be used only when necessary. Nearly all messages can be directly composed in or copied into an e-mail message, complete with sophisticated formatting, which saves both the recipients’ time in reading the message and also server storage space. When a message must include information not directly presentable in an e-mail message, the relevant documents should, except when sending to an external recipient or when security or other considerations dictate, be saved to a mutually accessible shared location (such as a shared SkyDrive folder) and referenced in the message with a hyperlink. This practice conserves network resources by not multiplying copies of the document and allows immediate updates to be posted without message redistribution.
Graphical Stationery & Signatures
Graphical stationery and signatures should be avoided. Such graphical attachments (especially those which are not built into the mail client software) unnecessarily consume additional server storage space and network bandwidth and are unreadable to some external clients.
Privacy
Ownership of Information
LFCDS retains ownership of its communications and computing facilities. Messages, documents, and other information residing on LFCDS e-mail, voicemail, file servers, and end-user computers are legally the property of LFCDS.
Information Retention
LFCDS regularly backs up all of its servers, including e-mail, voicemail, and file servers. These backups create information archives that may exist indefinitely.
Logging
To protect system security, data integrity, and ensure compliance with this policy, LFCDS actively logs user activity on its IT resources. In particular, LFCDS logs all Internet connections originating from its network (whether from LFCDS or privately held equipment) as well as all Internet connections from LFCDS provided computers. All e-mail messages sent on LFCDS e-mail accounts are also logged.
Supervision and Monitoring
Privacy of information residing on or passing through LFCDS systems is respected during normal system administration. However, LFCDS reserves the right to examine any data found on the school's information networks in order to protect the well-being, safety, or security of any student or other person, or to protect property. As with locker checks, LFCDS may examine the contents of individual student file storage, e-mail boxes, Web logs without prior notice.
Legal Proceedings
Electronic data is subject to legal discovery proceedings. LFCDS must comply with any court order demanding production of any electronically held data.
ePAL Procedures
Protection
Students are responsible for protecting their ePAL tablet PCs at all times.
ePAL tablets may not be brought into the lunch room or any sporting venue.
ePAL tablets must be in their school-provided protective bags at all times when not in use. The bag should always be fastened shut before carrying. The laptop must be alone in its separate padded compartment within the bag, with any other contents of the bag arranged so as not to damage the laptop.
ePAL tablets must be in Standby, Hibernate, or Off mode when in a bag to prevent overheating and hard drive damage.
No food or drink is allowed within reach of computers except water in spill-proof bottles. Water bottles must be kept out of spilling distance of computers. Beverages may not be sipped from over any part of the computer.
Security
ePAL tablets must be either attended or stored in a designated location [locker charging station] at all times.
ePAL tablets must be taken home each night during the school year.
ePAL tablets may be taken on athletic team away-game trips for the purpose of completing homework on the bus with the permission of the coach. [ePAL tablets must remain locked in the bus and may not be taken into any sporting venue.]
ePAL tablets may be taken on school-sponsored field trips for which a laptop has been deemed necessary by the trip leader.
ePAL tablets should in general be kept at home during breaks and other times and not taken on trips. If necessary to take on a trip, appropriate security precautions must be taken (for example, the ePAL tablet should be stowed securely as carry-on luggage on any flights).
Classroom Use
ePAL tablets are provided as educational tools with the expectation that students will learn to use them in the day-to-day management of schoolwork, to improve the effectiveness of their learning, to improve the quality of their school work.
Students must bring the ePAL tablet and any required accessories to all academic classes or as directed by the instructor.
Students must bring ePAL tablets to school fully charged in the morning.
While in class or quiet study areas, speakers must be muted except when audio is being used as part of an assignment.
Students may only use ePAL when explicitly directed to by the teacher and only for purposes directly related to the lesson in which students are engaged. All other uses are considered disciplinary infractions, for example:
- e-mailing during class unless for educational purposes and at the direction of the teacher
- surfing the Web during class
- playing games during class
- doing homework for another class or at a time when homework is not to be worked on
- using the ePAL tablet when the teacher has indicated that it is not to be used.
Personalization
Because the ePAL tablet PC is leased equipment, students may not personalize the equipment with any markings, stickers, or other decorations. Student ePAL tablets and carrying cases will be labeled by the School with student name and advisor. Students may not remove these or any other school or manufacturer-affixed identification labels. Students should inform the IT Service Center if any provided identification labels are missing or become unreadable.
Software Installation
Students may not install software on ePAL tablet PCs without permission from a teacher for educational purposes. The approving teacher will then contact the IT Service Center to perform the software installation.
Personal Equipment
Both to ensure the integrity and reliability of the school’s network and to protect student equipment, students are not permitted to bring their own computers, computer peripherals (such as printers, Web cameras, scanners, and similar), or network equipment to school unless use of such equipment has been recommended by an LFCDS Learning Development Teacher in coordination with the student and his or her parent(s)/guardian(s) as part of an Individualized Education Program (IEP). The IEP must be approved by the Director of Learning Development and the Head of the Division in which the student is enrolled. The Director of Learning Development notifies the IT Department and the student’s teachers of the approved equipment.
Equipment approved for use under an IEP is subject to the same restrictions as any LFCDS-provided computing equipment as defined in the LFCDS Responsible Use Policy. Specifically, the equipment may only be used for school-related activities while at school and may not be interconnected with the LFCDS network or computers except by means of USB flash drive for transferring files.
In rare circumstances, students may be granted permission to connect to the LFCDS network from their personal laptop computer as part of their IEP. These instances must be approved by the Director of Information Technology to meet the following criteria for the protection of the LFCDS network: (1) The laptop must meet LFCDS IT Department specifications. (2) The laptop must be secured by the IT Department for safe use on the LFCDS network, including installation of virus protection and lock-down to prevent additional software installations.
Students granted the privilege of bringing their own computer to school must display a high degree of personal responsibility by keeping their laptops in their possession throughout the day, making arrangements with their advisor or tutor for safe keeping of equipment during periods when they are unable to have their laptops with them. LFCDS cannot be responsible for theft of or damage to personal equipment.
IT Department support for personal computers must be limited to assistance transferring files to LFCDS equipment and ensuring proper operation of any LFCDS-installed software or settings.
Reporting
Students should report any violation of this policy to a teacher. Sharing concerns and reporting issues should begin with the student's advisor. Violations of this Responsible Use Policy are referred to the appropriate Division Head and will be handled through the Lake Forest Country Day School discipline system.