At the start of the fourth quarter, the Shawnee Mission School District began piloting a Canvas lockdown browser in all secondary schools — middle and high schools — in the district. Teachers had requested a tool to help preserve the integrity of tests for years, according to SM East instructional coach Kelsi Horner.
The lockdown browser program has been instated to prevent cheating, but students and teachers have reported that the system is glitchy and unreliable. The program works purely during Canvas quizzes and uses a separate application.
“The whole point of assessments is to see what [students] learned,” Horner said. “The other issue with that is if [they’re] cheating on it, then it's no longer valid. So part of it is protecting the security of the test, and part of that is protecting the teacher's time that they've put into it.”
Horner reached out to a few SM East teachers, like English teacher Erica Jackson, since teachers had been asking for a similar tool for years and had already been using quizzes in Canvas for the program to be tested with.
The lockdown browser is being piloted through Respondus, a platform with various assessment tools for learning systems. It will be available until the end of the year, and depending on feedback from the schools, SMSD will decide whether to buy it for the 2026-27 school year.
Horner believes if the program is continued in the district, teachers might start using Canvas quizzes more instead of relying on paper tests, saving teachers time on grading and giving students their test scores back sooner.
“I think a lot [of teachers] are kind of holding out until there’s something that exists and we just haven’t had anything that was a guarantee,” Horner said.
The SMSD has not received official feedback yet, but Horner approves of the program and feels it works well in most classrooms.
SMSD Instructional Technology Coordinator Jenny Collier helped teams at the district to implement the program. Piloting the lockdown browser was free, but Collier is not sure what program would cost or where the money would come from.
Sophomore Sarah Kate Macfee has used the lockdown browser in both her Honors English 10 and AP Macroeconomics classes. Although Macfee believes the idea of the program is good in classrooms, she finds the program itself to be slow and glitchy.
Downloading the application took 15 minutes off of Macfee’s test time during the period. The second time pulling up the application took as long as the first, and most of her actions with the computer’s mouse were delayed, according to Macfee.
“I don't love it,” Macfee said. “I'm fine with the whole idea of it, [and] I think it's for a good cause, but it's very glitchy. It takes a lot of work to figure out how to use it.”
Jackson has tried the lockdown browser with both her freshmen and senior classes, and has encountered similar technical difficulties trying to get the program pulled up.
While some of her students downloaded the application and got it working in a matter of minutes, other students still couldn’t get the program running days after Jackson worked through it during class.
Jackson used to use Apple Classroom to monitor screens, but says it often didn’t work and was unreliable, creating issues whenever she uses it.
Though Jackson thinks the lockdown browser works for now, her ideal solution would be a program that can lockdown the computer on any website — not just during Canvas quizzes. This would help manage students on computers during class time and ensure students stay on task, according to Jackson.
“We need [the lockdown browser], because we're having to go back to more pencil and paper things because of [Artificial Intelligence], and because [students are] using resources they're not allowed to,” Jackson said. “But then it's hard to grade things on paper, because it's hard to read their handwriting. It takes more time.”
Horner hasn’t faced as many problems downloading the platform as Jackson has, but noted that she’s heard of other schools in the SMSD with similar issues. Neither are sure if these issues are from the program or user error while setting it up.
“We're told not to print so much, but then it's like, ‘Well what do you want?’ Jackson said. “[The lockdown browser] is the best choice right now. If we don't have a lockdown browser then we just print a lot. And they tell us not to do that.”
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