Anyone in New York Using SketchUp for Schools?

How are you using it legally now that we need to be compliant with Education Law 2-D?

You’ll have to elaborate a bit. What is “Section 2-D” and what part of it would be infringed by using SketchUp for Schools?

Here is the Law if I’m not mistaken.

We have been told that students cannot use programs that require personal identifiable information (PII) without the vendor signing a 2-D compliancy letter drafted by our district council. SketchUp and other vendors who create free services for schools and students to use have told me that they do not sign 3rd party agreements.

I know SketchUp follows all of the other federal guidelines for keeping students’ information safe, but there is no mention of New York’s State Education Law 2-D in their private policy. It seems California has something similar because SketchUp mentions it. I was hoping they do the same for New York.

Also, I am frustrated with all this bureaucratic ■■■■ that just seems like another hoop to jump through when there are other regulations out there to protect students’ PII. I was just wondering how other New York School are managing this.

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Thanks for the clarification!

I’m not in New York, but we have the same issue in Illinois. Our new state student privacy law prevents us from using the online version of SketchUp (per our District’s lawyers). It has been very difficult to get clear answers from Trimble regarding this issue and emails go unanswered. We were able to get around this issue by taking part in the state grant program for the downloadable version of SketchUp, but that is being shut down in July of this year. At this point, we are beginning to look for alternatives for our curriculum because we can’t seem to get anywhere with Trimble.

My searching of the forums shows SketchUp staff continuing to refer to their Education TOS, which isn’t helpful in regards to all of these new privacy laws. My understanding is that Trimble feels that they are not collecting any PII through SketchUp for Schools; however, by using the tool through Google Drive, student data is shared with Trimble.

I ended up creating a single dummy email address and password at school, signed up for SketchUp Free via Trimble with that dummy account, and shared that info with all my students. Instead of saving projects to the now ‘shared’ SketchUp drive they must instead download them and save them locally or upload them to their google drive. It is slightly annoying as it adds 2-3 unnecessary steps to the saving and loading process, but it is a good lesson/exercise for organizing digital files.

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