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On Jan. 28 NS students, staff and parents received an email from NS systems engineer and administrator Enoch Brown informing them that Google would be ending some of their services, including YouTube, Google Translate, Google Earth and Google Maps, for students in March.
“I went in [our Google administrator console] a couple months ago and it says ‘Confirm acknowledgment of parental controls requirement for the additional Google services starting in March 2025,’” Brown said. “I’m scrolling through, and I see Google Maps and YouTube on here and honestly that caused me to panic a little bit that they were taking away YouTube. I’m like ‘That’s gonna just wreck things.’’’
Teachers at NS use material on YouTube to aid in teaching their classes.
“I went and researched it and did discover that it’s not completely going away,” Brown said. “It’s just [that] students won’t be able to access the YouTube interface. They’ll be able to access embedded videos that are approved on our domain.”
While students will no longer be able to browse YouTube themselves, they will still be able to watch YouTube videos that teachers have marked as approved and have embedded into another program such as Canvas, a program used at NS that allows teachers to post their course material online. While this will still allow teachers to use material on YouTube to help teach their students, some classes rely on students being able to access YouTube.
“I don’t think [these restrictions] will affect [my teaching] too much ‘cause a lot of that Google stuff doesn’t really apply to my content area with the exception of YouTube,” language arts teacher Alex Bailey said. “Right now [my classes are doing their] ‘Romeo and Juliet’ projects where they’re comparing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to something else. They need to have textual evidence, and if they’re comparing it to a movie, obviously movie clips are great pieces of textual evidence. I’m like ‘Great. They’re not gonna have access to that.’”
Some classes also need students to have access to Google Earth.
“[Students] use [Google Earth] in one of [science teacher Kolbie Henrie’s] classes and they use it in the middle school in some of their science classes,” Brown said. “It’s just a beautiful way to see the Earth. But what do you do? When [Google says] you can’t have it you can’t have it.”
Students use Google Earth and Google Maps out of pure curiosity during their classes as well.
“Sometimes I’m like ‘Oh, I wonder where that is,’ so I look it up on Google Maps,” sophomore Melo Chambers said.
Students will still have access to Apple Maps on school devices which will still allow them to see where things are similarly to Google Maps.
On top of the end of Google services for students, school district-provided email addresses are also changing. Staff email addresses are changing this month and student email addresses are changing next school year.
“Right now our email addresses are sharing three pieces of PII which is not even legal,” Brown said. “You’ve got your first name, you’ve got your last name and you’ve got the school district. That’s a lot of information about you.”
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as well as regulations defined by the state of Utah restrict the amount and which types of personally identifiable information (PII) can be shared as well as which institutions and individuals that PII can be shared with. To comply with these regulations, NS school district administration is changing the format of district-provided email addresses.
The current format is [email protected], the m. being only for students. The new format will only include a first initial instead of a full first name and will get rid of the m. for students making it [email protected].
“Right now the technical limit for the length of the username portion of the email [is] 20 characters,” Brown said. “And we have students when you combine their [first and last] names, that are more than 20 characters. It just truncates their [name] in the middle of it. When you think of a poor elementary kid who has to learn where he stops typing his name, that’s annoying.”
The new format will solve this issue for the majority of students that it affects. However, it will present the issue of names that end up being duplicates.
“We’ll have a lot of duplicates so we will have a lot of students with 1’s and 2’s,” Brown said. “The first part [of the email address] will be like firstinitiallastname1. Or for staff, we’re gonna have a lot of ‘C. Christensens.’ There are multiple ‘C. Christensens’ in this district so there will be ‘cchristensen1’ and ‘cchristensen2’ and that will be annoying, and we’ll just have to get used to that.”
Students and teachers will still have their old email addresses as an “alias” meaning that if someone sends an email to your old firstname.lastname@(m.)nsanpete.org email address it will still be sent to you. However, when you send an email to someone it will still only show that it came from your new [email protected] email.
“You will still be able to email [a staff member’s] alias,” Brown said. “It’s just when they [send an] email it’s going to say it is from [their new email] so that we’re not sending out tons of information. So they will still receive the emails you send to them.”
