Hello,
I'm a middle school teacher who has spent over four years developing an extensive 18 week introduction to CS using Scratch. Because students can chat with anyone without oversight my district is now telling me it's going to ban Scratch and I will be blocked. We had an incident where a student was given a death threat over scratch and the account was not banned or blocked and they continue to threaten my student.

Everything I've been working for as a computer science teacher will be lost.

Please consider adding a feature where teachers can block students from commenting and seeing other student's comments. This is the only way our school district will allow us to use Scratch. My students only have access to Chromebooks.

Thank you,
Middle School Teacher

I believe that’s possible with teacher accounts.
If they block it: Have the school look at the offline editor/download it on the chromebooks(I assume that’s what you’re using), and have your students upload them at home for grading: https://scratch.mit.edu/download

As far as I understand Scratch does not have an offline Scratch app for ChromeOS. Right now it's only for MacOS and Windows. My students only have access to Chromebooks.

The teacher accounts do not have the feature where commenting can be toggled off.

click on Download(linked above), and next to Windows and MacOS is ChromeOS

Thanks for showing me that. So maybe I can give the argument if Scratch is downloaded to each computer then the students don't have access. I will have to see if that argument works with the district IT department. Thanks for your help on that part!!!

mommakittybc wrote:

We had an incident where a student was given a death threat over scratch and the account was not banned or blocked and they continue to threaten my student.

Have you and/or your students reported the user's comments? Behavior such as this is definitely not tolerated here as per Scratch's Community Guidelines. If the Scratch Team finds out, (through reporting or Contact Us) the user who sent those threats will absolutely recieve a punishment.

EatNYeet wrote:

mommakittybc wrote:

We had an incident where a student was given a death threat over scratch and the account was not banned or blocked and they continue to threaten my student.

Have you and/or your students reported the user's comments? Behavior such as this is definitely not tolerated here as per Scratch's Community Guidelines. If the Scratch Team finds out, (through reporting or Contact Us) the user who sent those threats will absolutely recieve a punishment.

Please use the Report button on any projects or comments that go against the Community Guidelines. That sends a link right to the Scratch Team moderators so they can look at the issue directly and take any necessary action. We take threats very seriously. You may also want to contact the Scratch Team directly by using the Contact Us link at the bottom of every page.