Dive Brief:

• Guidance counselors are enabling student success across both social-emotional and academic areas thanks to new tech tools utilizing artificial intelligence and data analytics, according to EdTech: Focus on K-12.
• One tool, GoGuardian's Admin 2.0, is cited as not only being able to filter content based on what it learns is appropriate or not, but also for monitoring students' online behavior for activities that indicate they might be prone to self-harm or involved with cyberbullying.
• Additionally, EdTech reports that schools can further improve data use in counseling by partnering with local nonprofits and organizations, such as the one in which DC Public Schools tracked how graduates performed in college and used that data to help better prepare current students.

Dive Insight:

Aside from making it easier to keep track of and predict student performance, providing interventions when necessary, data analytics tools have also given schools more ways to track progress on digital citizenship. Applications on school-issued devices, like the aforementioned Admin 2.0, can monitor activity and provide reports, in addition to evidence when an incident does occur. 

Guidance counselors have long played a key role in social-emotional development, but the additional insight afforded by these new technological tools should also lead administrators to consider whether counselors' responsibilities should be expanded to include a greater role in teaching key components of digital citizenship along those lines, as well. The data they now possess can further open students' eyes to the consequences of their actions online and how thin the anonymity they think they have via the internet may really be.