I’d like to get a general understanding of what school districts are doing in reference to USB Flash Drives and students. Do you allow students to use their personal flash drives at your district? Are they allowed to use them with district computers for homework and such? Are there concerns of students loading tools to try and bypass content filters?
Source: Email question

A few responses from Texas school districts…what do you do in your part of the world?

• We have all teachers on alert for flash drives or disks. Our students have email accounts and can access that account from home. They can email themselves whatever they need and that attachment or email is scanned 3 times by various software filters before it is ever opened. We do not allow them at this time to carry any disks or drives with them. This policy has been in place for over 8 years and it works just fine.

• We allow them to bring the flash drives in. We have a lot of students who do not have printers at home and want to print in the library. We do a lot of collaborative projects. They do not have the right to load the drivers so inform the students they should not purchase off brands. We have AD policies that do not allow them to launch executables from the USB. That does not prevent everything but it does prevent most things they try. We are more than likely removing this right since we are providing Exchange email accounts to our students (9-12) next year.

• We are looking at portable apps on flash drives, though. We try to have as open a network as we can and take care of the problem makers. It really is a shame to limit all of the kids because of a few. Now, I am not saying we give full run, no filtering, etc. But we want the students and faculty to feel like they are functioning in an open environment so that they can be creative in instruction and learning. Flash drives have been very helpful in collaborative projects as well as individual like video editing, audio (podcasts), and such.

  We use deep freeze, so if there is a virus we just reboot. We have not really seen any issues so far with the flash drives being used by staff or students. So far, so good. I would recommend that you do avoid the drives that boot with U3. Those are awful. Kingston DataTraveler have been awesome.

• All my lab systems and most of the teacher systems do not have floppy drives. Flash drives are the only thing that students and teachers put data on. We use AD and LightSpeed to insure that students are at least kept a bay, but the best solution we have found is “NetSupport” . It’s on all our labs and the teachers can turn on or turn off cd roms and usb at will.

  They can also see what is on the usb the instant a student plugs it into the system. This is a new addition to the “NetSupport “ software that started with version 9.x.The ability to turn internet, apps, cd roms, and usb ports on or off and controlling what students see and do from a teacher’s desk has been a great help. Music sharing seems to be our biggest problem with usb drives.

• Technology should be seamless, therefore, students should be allowed to use their drives at school. Our library sells flash drives as a fund raiser. All our student machines are protected and “rebuild” themselves at boot up. Executables to bypass the URL filter — no filter is perfect and computers are a tool, not a baby-sitter for lazy or busy instructional staff. In the end, getting past the filter and not being on task is a supervision issue not a technology issue.

• We allow Thumb drives at our school, but since we are 1:1 and do not have a computer lab we do not have that much of a worry. One concern you might want to be aware of, since Linux has a USB bootable OS, students can use the thumbdrives and boot into Linux on your lab computers and bypass all the security you set in place that is incorporated with windows or whatever OS you have set up. Depending on what version Linux they use, they can also bypass the windows files share permissions that you have set in place. Older versions of Linux do not recognize the permissions and thus can access the folders no matter how you lock them down, hence the reason most data recovery specialist use Linux to recover lock windows data. Newer versions of Linux recognizes and utilizes the windows NTFS.

Another question that pops up about USB drives is…

Where do you obtain USB drives with your school logo and name on it?

One response (which I’ve tried and found useful myself):

• Custom USB Drives – http://www.pexagontech.com
  The rep is Liz Reemsnyder (203)788-2554 (ereemsnyder@pexagontech.com)

Digital Locker Alternatives to Pen Drives:

• Xythos, www.xythos.com. One customer reports that this is a “very elegant, rock solid product, built around the WebDAV protocol. Xythos is being used by a lot of the major universities, to include UT, Baylor and A&M. For several universities, this is their network file storage solution for students and staff.”
• Acma, www.acma.com, also has a “digital locker” product.
• Gaggle.net also has a digital locker solution.

Other ideas or products you’d like to share? Leave a comment.

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