So I’ve been getting tweaked by filters again and the amount of stuff that many schools block and try to keep away from kids and, to a depressingly large extent, teachers as well. I know this is just a repeat of the same basic issues that have been floating around here for a while, but for some reason I’ve been slamming into that wall both technically and intellectually in the past weeks more than usual. Frustrating when it seems to be getting worse instead of better.
At one recent event, I had a couple of hours between my sessions and since the wireless was spotty, one of the school administrators offered up his office and his computer for me to use. “Slow as hell,” he said as he logged me in. He wasn’t kidding. But the worst part was that I really needed to get onto my Gmail account to snag a file and it was, of course, blocked. Google docs, blocked. YouTube, blocked. Webpages came up with photos and videos “x’d” out. Apparently, everyone in the school suffered under the same filter. And the same was true of a school superintendent I spoke with who lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.
I swear I wanted to grab them both and shake them and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you stand for that?”
Oy.
I say this all the time, but I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is.
Seriously, am I missing something? Why is that so hard to implement?
The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.
It’s why I love my wireless card … I can always get to YouTube from school if I have to. Several of our high schools have purchased several cards just for that reason – teachers check them out when needed.
We actually do pretty well though – Flickr, blogs, wikis, Skype, Twitter – not blocked. Myspace, Facebook blocked.
Brian
That’s another issue that school district have not addressed. (Or have they somewhere in the small print?)
Teachers that bypass school network resources.
Is it ethical to do so? Should disciplinary action occur if administration did not approve?
-Malik
As a student teacher last fall without my own desktop computer, I resorted to using my wireless card to, ahem, borrow internet from the homes neighboring the school.
I felt bad for doing this, mostly because I was worried about stealing bandwidth, but also because I was able to chat on AIM and check my facebook during my prep and lunch periods.
As far as the logistics of internet are concerned, I’m not so savvy- is it feasible to restrict access (moderately) to students, but not to teachers? If so, it seems like a no-brainer to do. Obviously, adults (hopefully) have more discretion that students, and will (hopefully) leave “personal” matters for their home computers.
All told, Tech services do have access to teachers’ internet histories, so why not inform teachers that their computers will be monitored and leave it at that? Who’s to say that the Techs have authority anyway…?
Ethical? Let’s talk money.
Bottom line – you are violating the law and you are invalidating your eRate discounts.
Check the CIPA law – accessing Internet using district computers without a Technology Protection Measure is a violation of CIPA, which puts your eRate discount at risk. This is big bucks, app. 50% of your total Internet and telephone costs usually. Using a personal laptop may or may not be OK but that is a question for the school lawyer.
Actually, that’s not true. You’re required to have a filter, and you’re required to have a policy dictating how you will enforce it. But how restrictive or open you make things is entirely up to you and your school/district.
I am in Mrs. Leclaire’s English 10 class and she wanted us to find a blog that we could respond to, so I chose this blog. I agree that teachers should be allowed better access; however, I don’t think that the students should. I think that the access would be more of a distraction for the students in class as well as in the library when they should be doing homework. The teachers should because they wouldn’t get distracted and they could access they e-mails (Gmail) easier. Furthermore if they showed a video from youtube they can access it more easily during the class. This is why I think that teachers should have more freedom when it comes to the internet and why student should not.
Timely post Will. I am fortunate to work in a district that’s doesn’t block everything. However, we use the LightSpeed filtering system and every Monday I come back and find sites that were not blocked on Friday, blocked on Monday. Luckily I work in the Tech. Dept. now and the engineer asks me about teacher requests to unblock sites. I say unblock them all!
There is a great disparity between the tech and ed world. Since the collision emerged due to the prominence of the Internet, web filtering will always be an issue.
I am not sure if there is any school district in our nation that has a advertised policy or procedure of submitting web site approval or unblockage.
Until educators have direct access to the district’s firewall or web filtering mechanism, our digital citizens will continue to be restricted.
-Malik
At my school we have filters, but just about anything I request to be opened is done, and done quickly. We do have restrictions on pictures and videos, though. One reason is that our T1 line just can’t handle the bandwidth necessary for some graphics and streaming video. The other reason is the inappropriate pictures and videos that the students would have access to. I agree that we need to teach the kids how to use the internet responsibly, and that is a big part of my computer curriculum, but I also agree that we need to filter the inappropriate stuff.
Unfortunately, at least in my district, it seems the only people who are not able to access whatever they need on the internet are teachers. In my building, if I pulled aside 20 students and asked them for the address to a proxy server that would bypass our district’s security, I’m certain that I’d receive at least ten different sites.
As much as we teachers can try to keep up with advancements in technology, it is the students who are the real experts in using, and finding (even illegally) whatever information they desire. Why can’t we as professionals be trusted to teach students how to use technology responsibly?
Thank you so much, Will, for addressing this. It’s such a relief to have someone on our (the teachers’) side. I am a teacher from the school you are referring to, and it *is* hell. I used to be able to use proxy sites to get to where I needed to go at school, but IT has rooted them all out and blocked them, at a rate which is alarmingly quicker than the one they work at to fix our tech problems. I have to go home to get anything web-related done. I was embarrassed to look around and realize how few educators in my district recognized even half of the sites you mentioned, and no wonder. We can’t access them.
I wanted to show some great Shakespeare videos to a group of teachers at a Folger Shakespeare Teaching Institute in June, but the school where we were having our classes blocked YouTube. You’re absolutely right. Instead of blocking everything, why don’t we teach students and teachers how to navigate? The ALA and our libraries have done a great job educating the public about challenged and banned books, and I think most folks agree that we should have free access to reading materials and allow parents to make decisions about only their own children’s reading, but why can’t we get there with the Web?
At my school, MySpace, Facebook, and all other Personals/Dating/Social Networking sites are blocked. When I wanted to try Ning with a class, all I had to do was e-mail our IT department, and it was unblocked. To me, that’s a good example of judicious use of blockers. But just blocking everything the way so many schools seem to do is something I can’t understand.
When I worked with some middle school kids this summer on a University campus with open access, it was almost impossible to keep them on task with Facebook and MySpace available. These were urban students and some didn’t have computers at home which made it even more tantalizing. I have always felt that everything should be open but this experience opened my eyes to judicious blocking as having some value.
I agree with Kathryn. My district is fairly conservative with their blocking policies. You Tube is blocked, social networking blocked, etc. But they are pretty good about unblocking things on request. They were even open to try to open specific You Tube videos on request.
But students being students find their way around things. Google images is fairly easy to access, even hough it is officially blocked. There is a certain population with whom it is virtually impossible to keep on task when they can look for images of the Simpsons, or the latest rap artist, or we won’t even mention porno. Before we blocked email—AND provided Gaggle.net, a huge portion of kids spent the day emailing. No attempt to do any school work. With email restricted to Gaggle, those kids are much more on task.
The problem is, really, kids are kids. Always have been, always will be. If there are few consequences for poor choices, many will continue to make poor choices. There really are few reasonable and realistic consequences that a school can provide for these poor choices. So the only option becomes the block.
I am on the anti-filtering side of the debate, in favor of teaching students/children, and faculty what to do should an inappropriate site, image, etc pop up.
In the business world, most internet access is not blocked, yet people get their jobs done every single day. (Even after releasing the statistic that 25% of internet use during work is for personal use!).
Maybe we need to be teaching more time management and online behavior instead of just “protecting them”.
Just one example, employees at Borders have NO internet access because of problems with employees. Our book vendor has to bring in his own laptop and pay for wireless access at the cafe to access Amazon.com.
Will,
Great post and I feel your pain! My district in DE has two filters to worry about: the one for the district and a state filter since our lines are shared with the state lines. Our district IT folks are pretty good about getting me access to sites I need for instructional purposes. However, if the state filters it too, I have to try to negotiate that additional hurdle and am almost never successful. We also have serious bandwidth issues so most videos/pictures/music are blocked as well. It can get VERY frustrating when planning lessons since I am never sure about my access at work when I plan things at home. Additionally, teachers have access to some things at school but students don’t. I found this out recently when I planned a lesson around students posting comments on my class blog site, but they were blocked…from edublogs! I got the problem resolved, but not until the third period of the day. Back-up plans are a must when planning on using the Internet in school.
I do agree with filtering, however. I teach 7th graders and if they had access to everything, I know where they would spend their time…regardless of my teaching. I just can’t see them all and monitoring everything all the time is virtually impossible. Middle-schoolers are curious about everything…and school is not necessarily the best place for the entirety of what’s available online.
In many cases, filters manage to keep out teachers instead of students. Students who want to get past a school filter can usually figure it out. Teachers either wouldn’t know how or if they did could face ramifications impacting their employment. Why would we continue to employ someone whose professional judgement we did not trust or value. I was recently invited to do a hands-on workshop on wikis for a library conference held in a very prestigious prep school, and got to the school to find out that “all wikis” are blocked there. I learned never to assume that I will have access to information. SIGH!
I am on both sides of this too. I get mad when I run into a filter, but I am also a librarian with 74 computers and we finally just got a monitoring system which has been awesome. From the front desk, I can see what the students are doing and can discuss their choices and make it a teachable moment. The problem is that you have to constantly be monitoring. You should see some the stuff these kids are accessing, even with a filter and knowing we are watching. It makes me a little sick to think of how much crap they have been accessing at school the previous 7 years when we couldn’t discuss with them.
It is certainly a thorny issue but in general I agree that more access is better. We have blocked You tube but only for the students …different settings for teacher log ins.
It is interesting to me that the question of keeping students focused comes up in this discussion. We are planning to go one to one next year and as part of the discussion we are looking at software to allow the teacher to see the students screens and also to blank them at crucial points when their attention is needed for direct instruction.
Time on task has always been a classroom issue and sometimes I wonder if having internet access is really the distraction or if it just makes more obvious who is with you and who is not…We have struggled with this on varying levels and we learn a little more each day about what modeling and front loading we need to do before we start the work… in our school we have occasionally assumed students had more expertise than they actually did and it resulted in a lot of less than productive computer time and student frustration.
Also returning to the filtering issue.. if we want it to be flexible and even want to give the teacher some discretion or ability to unblock I need some help. We are managed on site and I do not have an IT department so I need your expertise. What are the best filtering options out there for a small school?
I have that software and it is fabulous for teaching in a lab. You can also set it so they can only see your screen on their desktop and their desktop is locked.
This is my 8th year teaching in a lab, and for the first time I felt like I was in control of the classroom. Before, students always appeared to be paying attention, but I was wrong.:)
I use monitoring software in my classroom – a computer lab. I used NetSupport for a few years. I loved it, but because you could connect to computers that students were NOT logged in to, it showed my account as accessing the same sites the kids did when they were logged in. Essentially, I was logged into all the computers in my lab. This became an issue last year when it looked as though *I* had attempted to access some pretty bad sites. Luckily, the powers that be knew I would never do that, but ti was decided that I needed to gt a new program, or give up my monitoring software. We did some research and ended up with Synchroneyes, which is also awesome, but I do miss being able to access computers that kids are not on. I was able to push out software to those computers without having to physically log onto each one. The monitoring software is also a great teaching tool – I can show my screen or another student’s screen to the whole class, I can send files to them and send web pages to them. Sending the web pages is great – no more waiting for everyone to type in the web address – correctly.
Unfortunately the state I live in mandates filtering but I witnessed a wonderful enlightening moment a couple years ago. Our local legislator was visiting – getting in some campaign pandering – and his crackberry died on him. Seeing my computer lab he asked if he could borrow one of my computers for a few minutes. Of course he could. I loved the look on his face when N2H2’s filter blocked his webmail access. He turned to me and asked, “Can you bypass this?” I deadpanned, “Only the tech coordinator, board employees, and students can do that.”
FYI – for those of you in districts using 8e6 for your filter, it has a built-in override feature tied to Active Directory.
While my district has a pretty open filter compared to most, we still block sites like YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Facebook, and Ning. (I’m working hard on getting Ning unblocked – so far have been able to whitelist a specific Ning, but Ning in general still blocked). The difference is, our teachers can use their active directory login to bypass the filter for things like YouTube and GoogleVideo on the fly. (They can do that on any machine, even if a student is logged in.) They’re still blocked from MySpace, Facebook and LiveJournal even with their override, but I then have a building override that allows me to get to those sites.
So, if you’re in a district that uses 8e6, ask your IT folks about implementing that override. Even if you don’t use that filter, ask anyway. Because according to my district’s CIO, he thinks it’s actually a requirement of CIPA that teachers are given an override, and can point to the specific language in the law that says so . . .
Carolyn Foote’s presentation notes about this topic at EduCon might
provide some useful resources. It includes links to the law.
According to Caryolyn
The Law requires:
filtering of images
ability to turn off filter for adult use(which would include students over 17)
internet policy for email, chat, etc.
http://educon20.wikispaces.com/SAT06RM204
Have you seen Doug Jonhson’s (AKA the Blue Skunk)post about asking ALA where is the campaign to end filtering? He had a fantastic “poster” to plug it. Look at it. He is pushing for a “Blocked Bytes Week” to bring attention to filtering being a form of censorship too.
http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2008/9/23/blocked-bytes-week.html
I am a tech coordinator for a school district in Ohio. In the past, we blocked sites due to bandwidth. Now that we have fiber connections in every school except one, we loosened up the filter. YouTube is unblocked. Gmail is unblocked. However, MySpace and Facebook are blocked. We use monitoring software in the labs and libraries, so the teachers and lab monitors can block sites using the software. My opinion is that it should be up to the teacher monitoring the students to tell them what is right or wrong.
I recall several years ago reading a thoughtful article by Ferdi Serim regarding our teaching students how to act when online. He used what seemed to me to be an excellent scenario, so I have adopted this story and applied it to the kind of life my own son might have had. Here’s my “take” on it:
Suppose my son, Chad, is a youngster and enjoys playing ball in the yard with his friends. So, in order to ensure their safety, I erect a big fence around my yard and gather the fellas around me so I can give them the rules. I tell them, “Now, I want y’all to be able to play safely, so you can run and play and toss all you want, but YOU MUST STAY INSIDE THE FENCE! As long as you’re inside the fence, you’ll be safe and nothing will happen to you. I’m an adult and you can trust me on that.”
They play and have loads of fun. But, they always stay inside the fence, knowing that they don’t have to worry as long as they’re protected by the fence I erected for them.
However, one day, they change their venue. They go to a large field in our community that has a tall fence around it. So, they figure that they’ll be safe as long as they stay inside the fence. They fail to notice one very small difference between this venue and the one at home — a narrow road runs through the middle of the field.
My son, Chad, is running like a streak from play to play, really enjoying this new field. But, every so often, he looks up, sees the fence around the field and thinks, “This is safe for us, because Dad said we’ll be okay as long as we stay inside the fence.”
So, he streaks off on a particular run and doesn’t even notice the car coming down the road. In horror, I look across the open expanse of the field just in time to see Chad darting across that road at the same moment the car speeds past. The two objects reach the same point at the same time.
I race to Chad’s side, hoping he hasn’t “left us.” As I hold him in my arms, he looks up at me and says, “Dad, you told me I’d be safe as long as I stayed inside your protective fence.” Imagine how I feel.
Now, how much better would everything have been if I had taken Chad aside and taught him, perhaps over and over, about how he needs to play on these fields. I might have carried him to the curb in my yard and explained to him, “Chad, many times, it will be safe to play in the yard, but look at this street. Cars and trucks can speed by here and they may not be watching for you. You have to be smart. It’s your responsibility to know that not everything you encounter as you play will be good for you. Some bad things will come along, so I want you to know what to do when you encounter them. You have to be smart. Be alert. Remember that YOU are the one who can get hurt if you don’t behave in a smart, alert manner. I want you to be able to play and have fun, but I want you to know about the environment in which you play.”
You may think this is a dumb story, but it works for me. That’s why when Chad was small and began using the computer (an Apple //e) I told him about things he would encounter in programs on diskette. Later, I talked with him about things he would run into on the web. Chad is now 34 years old and not only knows how to navigate the web safely, but he currently is a web designer and works to help make sure that, as much as possible, he creates safe places for people to explore and learn online.
Thanks, Will, for engaging us in this dialogue. Let’s do our jobs: teach and lead our youth to safe online citizenship rather than wasting our time trying to block everything that pops up online. Now, which is the better strategy for use of our limited resources? Teaching/leading/modeling or blocking/filtering/blocking/filtering…..?
My school offers an override feature too, for which I am thankful, and I must also say i have presented a case for sites to be unblocked and been successful. Sometimes the block is permanently lifted, and sometimes the block is temporarily lifted. I’m just glad I can make the requests. Recently though my login level has changed, granting me much more flexibility and freedoms. I can access more sites than the traditional teacher and student. At first I was happy about this, but now I’m finding that as I collaborate with teachers on using online sources in their classrooms, I must first log out as me and log in as a student (tightest restrictions) to see if the URL we want to use will be available at that login level. Sigh. In a way this new freedom has handicapped me more.
I would love to remove the blacklist and filter only porn. I would, sadly, catch hell for it. At this point though, with proxies popping up everyday and almost impossible to keep tabs, it isn’t like they are filtered anyway…
Here in Florida, USA, we use WebSense in our district. I can usually convince my IT guys to unblock anything that I feel could be useful to teachers. However, we are on the state’s network…they also have a WebSense filter in place that supersedes our district filter. From research, I’ve learned that there is a form I can fill out to “challenge” the blocking of a site, but I have been unable to find this form anywhere. As an Ed Tech Specialist at a high school, part of my job is to find resources that I can pass on to teachers to use in their lessons and it is becoming increasingly frustrating to find a link to, what I believe, could be an excellent tool, only to get that dreaded “Blocked by WebSense” message. I can only hope that someone will wake up soon and realize that this only ENCOURAGES kids to try to find ways around it…Let’s put some responsibility back on the kids and teachers to do the right thing and act responsibly.
I have yet to be given a good reason why techs are deciding which sites are educationally appropriate for a teacher’s classroom – isn’t that a call the teacher should be making? Recently, the head tech guy told me that the division would be blocking *all* personal sites and striking a committee to review exceptions. I occasionally upload files to my personal site that I want the students to access, but that avenue is now gone because my site is “personal”.
Our school system recently switched to Webwasher, which is an improvement over whatever we had last year, since it has different levels of permission for teachers and students (I can show YouTube videos, but students don’t have access). This causes headaches sometimes, as I have occasionally tested out a site, and assumed it will work fine because I can access it, only to find that it’s blocked from student accounts.
Filtering is absurd. There are bad sites and of course they should be blocked, but blocking Google Mail, Google Documents etc. is ridiculous. There are of course some blogs that would make my mother blush, but again too, we need to teach children/students how to make decisions. Ethical decision making is something that can and should be taught in schools. We use X-Stop at our school district. It’s not perfect and as the Technology Director I do everything in my power to unblock sites that are blocked at other schools.
I once built our own filter using Linux, Dansguardian and Squid. It worked well and I’ve come close to doing it again.
It IS getting worse and filtering/blocking is a disservice to learners. I am surprised that taxpayers stand for it as they are paying for this public education.
Will,
This is why I have quite seriously argued for some time that schools lack the maturity to handle the Internet and some might be well advised to be disconnected.
Telling kids that this crippled BS is their ticket to the world is a lie and lying to children is a lot worse than 6 hours per day without school provided net access.
Besides, it’s years, if not months before every kid is a network node anyway.
The real challenge is using computers in constructive ways that are immune to the paranoid delusional policies of the people running school networks.
Where are the unions on these matters????
This is a serious workplace issue. Teachers are treated like imbeciles and felons.
It should come as no surprise though. For more than 100 years after Bell invented the telephone, teachers were prohibited from using one or made to call the gynecologist from a payphone outside the cafeteria during lunch.
These issues are rooted in fear, paranoia and oppression. All three are threats to learning.
In my presentations lately, I’ve been reminding admin types that THEY are in charge of the library – not the IT department. It’d be the same for schools. Why are administrators allowing IT to makes some pretty important decisions? Argh…
Has anyone asked the decision makers on filters (whether they be IT or librarians or administrators) to work with one hand tied behind their back? Are the technical forums where they find answers that help them do their job blocked because they are web 2.0 tools. Do they have to wait until they get home to find the ‘just in time answer’ they might need to do their job more effectively.
Sigh!
On a positive note – there are network administrators and school leaders who get it. We were lucky enough to hire one of them. But then again he’s been through this before (many years ago) when they wanted him to shut down the first student run BBS in the state because it could be used to deliver an inapproriate message.
Thank you to all of the filtering decesionmakers who chose not to live in fear.
It’s not a matter of maturity. It’s a matter of attitude. Some schools and/or school districts are run by visionary leadership others are run by anal managerial types who have no clue about how to use the internet as a learning resource. They know all the buzzwords but they don’t have any real idea that much of what they are blocking is more relevant than much of what they’ve got on their bookshelves. Recently in our newsletter an administrator told about how we were preparing children for the 21st Century and then later in the same publication there was a lengthy discussion about the implementation of a new policy banning cell phones.
Some IT Directors are at fault but most are following the wishes of district administrators. I’ve worked under both the anal retentives and the progressives. Gary Stager mentions “unions” of which I am a member and many of their members are as anal as the administrators. They want kids focused on their boring lectures. It comes down to an issue of control and relevance. I know many teachers who are blogging themselves and/or blogging with students. I know many who want to use cell phones in schools for novel learning opportunities and then you’ve got the type who don’t want to use anything new. They would be comfortable in the old Latin schools at the turn of the 19th century.
This filter issue is a big one for me. I have been so frustrated that the more I embrace exciting use of tech in my class the more I run into speedbumps through filtering. At my school Open House I was excited to take parents on a quick tour of my wetpaint wiki; not only were all of my youtube videos invisible (as they always are in my building) but as I clicked on each page to show them my book clubs, virtual tutors and more, I was continually webwashed, causing annoying delays in even getting to main pages. My kids have assisted me in building a great resource through the wiki, and the video piece is strong. The inability of using the full tool in my classroom due to filtering is sad. I fully support your idea of dealing with abuses on a teacher by teacher basis as needed.
I’m having the same problem in my school. The technology coordinator blocks everything, including and we have to e-mail her to unblock it. This includes all videos, most pictures, and pretty much anything useful. I can’t even look up informaiton about fundraising for my after school activity without helpdesking the problem. A teacher I work with can’t find pictures of the solar system or solar cookers for his science class because of the blocks!
When will things change? The superindendent said that it’s the tech coordinators call. Can you believe this?
Our school also blocks all e-mail except the schools email. We can’t use any google applications because they say, “unblocking google docs or notebook will unblock g-mail as well.”
When did unregulated email become such a problem?
If kids want to send something inappropriate to eachother, they’ll just use their phones which work a lot faster than our computers, which only have 256 megs of ram.
Blame lawyers and their frivolous lawsuits. If Johnny sends a threatening letter to Jimmy from home the school won’t be sued. If he sends the letter from school…
If we can’t trust teachers with they’re own filter over-ride, how can we trust them with our kids?
Two years ago the buildings in my district were retrofitted with surveillance cameras over the holidays. The leadership team was concerned that parents might not be too happy about it. Imagine our surprise when our end of year parent surveys had not a single negative comment about the cameras…but more than a dozen parents suggested that cameras should be placed in all the classrooms to keep an eye on teachers. Not student behavior – teachers. And you are surprised that teachers aren’t trusted with over-ride password?
At our school district I’ve given teachers a filter over-ride password and from time to time we have to change it because the students “crack” the code. My approach works well. Filters are only necessary because Congress and believe it or not Bill Clinton passed a law called Childrens Internet Protection Act (CIPA) which mandates filtering and then only if you accept federal funds. Get rid of the funding and you can get rid of the filtering.
Filtering is becoming increasingly moot as students and teachers have access to more powerful cell phones with internet access. They don’t need our network(s) to view what they want and send messages when they want. I also pushed for a more liberal cell phone policy where we taught students how to use cell phones/PDAs for educational purposes. I was beaten back by the administration and teachers who said students could cheat. Yes, they can cheat if you continue to test them at the second first few levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but if you incorporate these powerful devices into classroom and test at the upper levels of the same taxonomy you will produce students truly ready for this century and for a variety of college programs. 🙂
Our district is fortunate as filtering is limited and teachers understand their responsibility for monitoring students using the Internet. IT is more concerned with the bandwidth being used video/audio uploads and downloads. We are working together to conserve bandwidth while limiting filters.
We do need to teach our students to use these tools effectively. They are using them but not necessarily for academic/work purposes. I am on a mission to educate the educators so that they can use Web 2.0 tools in their teaching and encourage students to use them in their learning. This year will bring about more dialogue with IT as more teachers and students using Web 2.0 tools.
I’m very much in the no-filters-let’s-learn-netiquette camp, but I’m curious to know what the implications are for a school district if a student was to access something age inappropriate?
I’d also like to know why it’s so harmful for students to check their Gmail or Facebook if they have a few minutes to spare? However, if students are dedicating prolonged periods of time during school hours to these tasks then it sounds like a different problem that needs to be addressed beyond by blocking legitimate sites like Google Apps, Gmail, Facebook, or Wikipedia. It’s a Band-Aid solution, which doesn’t target the cause.
Regardless, teachers (remember, they’re those people we trust to work with our children each day?) should be provided complete access to anything they need online, whether that is done by lifting filters or giving them complete override capabilities on-the-fly. @Tom Harrison makes a great point: “It can get VERY frustrating when planning lessons since I am never sure about my access at work when I plan things at home.”
If a child accesses something inappropriate it’s up the parents, teachers and administrators to act appropriately just like we might if that same child were to find something inappropriate in a library book. We have to teach students how to parse inappropriate material. In our litigious society though many parents are willing to sue schools for rather frivolous reasons. I can understand why some administrators are so averse to opening up the internet. All internet access should be moderated by professionals. We use Google Mail and Documents in our school. In a school of nearly 500 students we have about 180 with GMail and Document access and it’s worked okay so far.
I am a civil libertarian and a staunch believer in First Amendment rights. My views are not shared by all, but I have always fought to open up the school and community to internet access because I see it as the great leveler of our playing field. 🙂
Welcome to REALITY LAND in some schools. Many of the sites you reference, for all of us to use and integrate in schools, are blocked in schools. Sure our admins are unblocked and they can see “no problem” with the filters. Back in the classroom when you want to bring up one of these resources for students and teaching it is blocked! Frustrating, very frustrating.
Hayden
Unfortunately schools have become increasingly irrelevant due to peevish regulations and people more intent on preserving status quo than on educating children. I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I think it was McCluhan who said over forty years ago that information was far more accessible in the home than in any school. He said that 20 years before the internet even entered K-12. Mark Twain once said, “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.” We could extend that quote to include school administrations, state departments of education, federal education agencies and lets not forget NCLB. Try not to let schooling mess up your education.
I’d like to start a charter school where we could use an unbridled internet and cell phones/IPhones/Blackberrys along with open source tools and operating systems. Are there any takers? 🙂
“Try not to let schooling mess up your education.”
Beautiful. Well Said. I love it.
Everyone time we tell our own children or our students “no” it just makes them want to do it more. If we were to take all of these “no” items and embrace them what kind of problems would we really be dealing with. If we were able to treat these items with respect this may no longer be an issue. I think this kind of school would be great.
Nice post — good comments.
I guess my main question is “why didn’t you grab them both and shake them……”?
Though coming and sharing on your blog, I am sure relieved some of your frustration, got a conversation going about how unfair, unjust, and ridiculous it is……….but what did you do there??
Did you call up the IT? Did you send a letter to the superintendent?? Did you refuse to speak because they did not have the equipment you needed to present??
Just wondering…….not just you, WIll……but all of us. Are we just lamenting the fact on blogs — or are we taking a stand??
I hope you know I am Not picking on you, Will. Struggling with this myself.
Jen
Jen, as a teacher at the school in question, I can understand Will’s reaction. These two admin types would rather cut off their own feet than risk rocking the boat. Neither have been in a classroom since these web tools became essential, and the principal hasn’t a clue how to use any of the resources Will advocates.
I’m betting that he felt the waves of apathy rolling forward during his presentation — it’s hard to not despair when the wireless is patchy, the projector goes down fifteen minutes in, and the IT gang spends the next half hour trying to reboot everything. Thank GSD for Will’s sense of humour.
I have requested that sites be unblocked, and I have been denied each and every time.
Wow! 50 comments and counting. You struck a nerve with this one, Will.
The debate continues. In our district there are filters for students – – staff can get by the filters by using an “authority proxy” which is authenticated with the use of our staff directory [user name and password]. I am still shaking my head at the thought of teachers and administrators getting the “red hand”.
The reason for filtering, imho, is to protect the school district from litigation. I can just imagine the conversation among parents, lawyers and superintendents who need to go to court over some website content/creation which was accessed/created from a school computer. School districts just don’t need the hassle that unrestricted access could create. Now local private schools, that is another matter. No filters there. But that is the subject of another post.
On the other hand, I had a wonderful experience in the Province of Quebec’s only English school district last spring. Our group was touring a 1 to 1 project in the Eastern Townships. I had just purchased an ipod touch and one of our stops was a High School in the district. For fun, I thought I’d see if the school’s internet was filtered. To my surprise there were no filters at all. Full access! When I asked the Principal of the school about it he said, “Oh, the kids were always finding ways around the filters so we took them off”. The result: minimum problems. If students are accessing inappropriate stuff there are consequences.
That’s all for now. Thank you for your thought provoking post. It has been great reading all the replies. I even printed them this time. Super bed time reading.
Let the discussion continue!
I agree with you. My district does filter plenty, but not as crazy as what you described. We filter out YouTube, gaming websites, web email (gmail, yahoo, etc), and for course those “unapproved” websites with curriculum ideas.
When do even us as teachers get to feel like professionals and be TRUSTED to find appropriate resources on the web.
Keep up the good fight!!
We have filters too! at my school – mainly for porn but other sites get captured now and again. It’s only a quick email to get the site activated again. Having said that Google docs, gmail, Google chat are blocked permanently but not Facebook, Myspace, Beebo or MSN – go figure! Overall we do OK, but we don’t incorporate these tools in our learning with the exception of a few of us. We have so much to learn in schools about this whole issue – mainly that it isn’t so hard! It’s just about working in the kids world, and showing them about how to bend all these tools to learning as well as leisure. Thanks Will for keeping the conversation afloat.
I agree, it is insulting to be ‘filtered. I appreciate having my iPhone at work to access blocked/filtered sites. This blocking is inconvenient – to say he least – but the major issue is pedagogical. Students need to be critically multiliterate and to not teach them these skills is a travesty. Will is right to say, “I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them”.
Great comments and post!
Will and all:
I feel that the filter thing in schools is all about control. The IT folks have it and want to keep it. Giving free access to all school staff to all opens up a potential can of worms, but classroom teachers are not trusted enough it seems to make good judgements in this area.
Thank you Will for initiating another vigorous discussion … I nodded as I read through all the comments as well. My greatest frustration is that by blocking Google Apps and other great educational tools, it not only irritates and frustrates teachers who want to use these sites with their students but also perpetuates the non-use by teachers we are trying to encourage.
I worry about the disempowerment of educators in regards to taking on the IT powers-that-be. For instance, I blogged about using Google forms for surveying and even sent out an email to over 100 teachers with a link to the form and not one replied that it was blocked by NSW Dept of Ed (Australia)… not ONE! So either no one read my communications or no one is interested OR teachers just shrugged their shoulders and accepted the ‘blocked’ message.
The irony for NSW is that the Educ. Dept is going to give EVERY student a gmail account …. fabulous … but mixed messages?
The whole filtering issue is so ridiculous. One of the teachers I work with requested to have Google Earth downloaded onto her computer. The response from the IT was no, because then everyone would want it. Well, duh! What is so wrong with that? Someone please explain how you can abuse Google Earth!
It’s not about control its about ease of management. It’s a whole lot easier to just block certain content wholesale than get in there and make rules for this and that.
It’s not even an issue of issuing rights to teachers and administrators. It adds a layer of complexity to management.
Again it is just easier to “block all”
That is not good IT management but that is what it comes down to sometimes when the IT staff is overwhelmed (which comes with the job title), understaffed and on a tight budget leash.
The problem with having management address this with IT is that IT is overhead. All that needs to be said is that any changes in the filter will require a budget increase, increase down times, slow help desk calls, yadda yadda and the whole argument grinds to a halt pretty quickly.
Been there. Done that. Had to find a new job a few months later.
In an time when educators are including their students in the learning process and trying to include technology into the curriculum the IT department seems to do it’s best to fight it.
When push comes to shove it’s just easier to turn the whole thing off than manage the filters at all.
Filtering is done for one reason only and that is compliance with Children’s Internet Protection Act(CIPA). Public schools must filter, the choice of the filtering agent is theirs but since most schools don’t have the necessary IT people on staff to build their own they go with their upstream BOCES, IU or Internet Service Provider. If schools don’t filter their internet they lose E-Rate money and in some cases that is hundreds of thousands of dollars.”Schools and libraries subject to CIPA may not receive the discounts offered by the E-rate program unless they certify that they have an Internet safety policy and technology protection measures in place. An Internet safety policy must include technology protection measures to block or filter Internet access to pictures that: (a) are obscene, (b) are child pornography, or (c) are harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors).” Read more here
🙂
Don:
I am not sure that I but that. If I can put parental controls on my home computer, why can’t we do the same thing in schools? What is blocked in elementary school may not need to be blocked in high school! Wholescale site blocking is a crock, and I cannot see how it benefits anyone except those who are control freaks.
Thank you so much for addressing this issue. I have not read all the responses, but plan to. I teach high school seniors at a school of TECHNOLOGY and I am constantly fighting this issue but hit a wall due to the fact that the filters are “protecting” the children. I’m sorry, if we are a school of technology (and it is in our name), shouldn’t we be allowed to use Youtube, blogs, wikis, etc. in our classes? I had to FIGHT to get twitter unblocked and only after I thoroughly explained the educational value.
It is really frustrating, and I agree, doing MORE damage than not.
Almost everything is blocked, but our tech guy gives override accounts to any teacher or adminsitrator who wants them. Next step…teachers are going to have access to portable workstations (laptops) and the override doesn’t work at home so defeats the purpose for prep work. BUT we just need to convince our Board of Ed to trust them as professionals.
As a student, I don’t agree with the filters in place. This is not because I want to go on social networking sites or watch weird youtube videos (I don’t even have a myspace or facebook). It is because I agree that the outside world has no filter, and if high school is supposed to prepare us for “adult” existence, then by filtering sites, it is not preparing us for anything but the SAT. I was especially shocked that wikipedia was blocked in the school mentioned. I don’t necessarily think it should be used for important research, but it is a vital resource for quick facts, and depth of understanding for personal inquiries. I am so glad our school doesn’t filter wikipedia, that would make me furious!
There are many ways to filter. We use X-Stop at our school. Seven years ago I built a filter using Linux-Squid-Squidguard & Dansguardian and it worked well. We had autonomy and we have a measure of autonomy now. I know there are some control freaks who block things because they can, but most people don’t do that and as I mentioned at our school I try to open as much of the internet up as we can without breaking the law. I’ve given override passwords to teachers so they can access good content on Youtube, i.e. Presidential debates, educational content etc. We can’t open Youtube up to children in unsupervised situations because some children will get access to content that could be inappropriate. I’m a technology director with 20 plus years of experience. I am an social studies teacher who became a “techie” as some of you like to call it, because back in those days one had to wear many hats. I can assure that most people that work in IT are not bad people nor do they have it in for teachers or students, but we have to live within the CIPA legislation. We have to or we risk losing funds and/or our livelihood.
Filters are based on algorithms, they don’t make assumptions. It is possible on some filters to specify IP ranges and so an elementary school in one IP range could get a different level of filtering than a high school in another IP range, but most schools don’t have enough IT staff or an IT staff with the time to program the filter if it can in fact be programmed. Then too the internet is such a dynamic place that new sites are constantly being added and it’s nearly impossible to keep up with it all.
There is an old expression about the grass being greenest right over the septic tank. I’d invite an average classroom teacher to walk a mile in my shoes. Support hundreds of users, dozens of file servers, hundreds of workstations, be proficient in a number of operating systems (Windows, Macintosh and Linux), manage an email system, content management systems, instructional learning systems, support hundreds of printers, dozens of cameras, dozens of projectors, a phone system, keep an inventory of thousands of items and still have time to eat lunch and go home at night.
It’s also a matter of funding. Ever hear of E-Rate? If not you may want to read it about it.
It’s also about The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) http://www.e-ratecentral.com/CIPA/cipa_policy_primer.pdf
“Filtering is required for all of an E-rate recipient’s Internet-enabled computers whether used by minors or adults”
So unless you want staff fired to make up the hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, stop you whining and look for other sites that are open that you can use. Stop being so lazy and grow up. My goodness you sound like a bunch of little kids. Act like an adult and maybe you’ll be treated as one.
Act like an adult? I think that’s exactly what most people commenting here are doing. Plus, it’s not just a matter of money – many school districts in Canada have many of the same restrictive filtering policies, without the federal funding attached to mandate it.
This kind of attitude can get you fired quick.
As an IT Administrator, Part-time consultant and Educator myself I strongly recommend that you keep the following in mind:
1. “No” is not an Information Technology Management plan.
2. It is NOT your network. You didn’t buy it. You don’t own it. Even if you did, the network isn’t for you.
3. The network is for people to use. That is why they are called “users”.
4. It is common curtisey to let people know what changes you are making, when you are making them, and how it might impact them BEFORE you make the changes.
5. If people can’t use the network the network is is useless. If the network is useless then the IT Department is useless.
6. The most secure network that isn’t susceptible to down time or errors looks like a hallway closet. It is a small room with nothing but coats in it. You only need a coat when you are leaving the building.
7. IT is a service. Service means “to serve.” The ultimate purpose of an IT department is to serve the customer.
8. In education, staff and educators are your customers.
9. You will never get the IT job done. Never. Accept it. Get over it. Serve your customers.
10. Customers want to be included in If you include your customers in the conversation you will be surprised by what they know. Educators are, in general, intelligent. You don’t get a degree and end up stupid.
11. Make friends, don’t alienate your customers. If you alienate your customers they will work around your best efforts, make your life a living hell and then they will fire you.
12. The more friends you have in IT the more eyes you have on the network. You would be surprised about what you miss.
13. You should be excited that Educators are interested in technology at all. Work with them. Empower your customers.
It would be nice if educators could walk a mile in our shoes. I have (am) working both sides of the fence and I would like to think that I understand both sides. People have short fuses when what they did yesterday doesn’t work today because somebody fliped a switch without letting them know. Software developers HATE it when you push out updates without letting them know.
I have handled these kind of issues very successfully in the past. This is what worked for me.
I found out what I needed to accomplish. I looked at what I thought must happen to get it done. I put the problem back on them. I told them the about the issues and the benchmarks I needed to make. I asked one or two of them to test the policy and help others test the policy. We would discuss what we could and could not compromise on. Then I would implement the changes. They often found things that I had missed. They also occasionaly taught me eaiser ways to do certain things. They were involed. They were empowerd. They loved me.
I was able to do everything I needed and most of what I wanted to do. Everyone took responsibility. Everyone helped. Once they felt like they had a say they felt like they had an investment. They helped me make sure the policy was working right. They found the blind spots I missed. It is difficult to swallow crow and go back to the IT guy and tell him you messed up. They take responsibility for what they agreed to and generally accepted the consequences. This kind of bottom up approach builds trust and good will.
If you are in IT then you will agree that you need all the trust, good will and help you can get. Empower your users. They will empower you.
Eric and others, you might want to check out Doug Johnson’s post that Cathy Nelson referred to earlier. A lot of folks think the only definitive thing CIPA requires school district’s to block is pornography, and everything else should be on a case-by-case basis.
As Doug states in the comments to that post, his district only blocks pornography, and then people have to go through a process similar to book review to block additional sites (pretty much the opposite of how almost all school districts do it). In other words, the burden is on folks to make the case that a site is bad, not to make the case that a site is good. I’m pretty sure Doug’s district still gets E-Rate money.
This is in response to Eric. Eric (if that’s your real name), as a tech specialist at a high school, it IS MY JOB to find new and useful sites for teachers. The web filters currently in place prevent me from doing my job AS MY CONTRACT IS WRITTEN!!! Very few people in this thread have suggested that we open the filter for students, but it would be nice for, people in my position, to be able to do our job. Sounds like you’re the one that needs to begin acting like an adult judging from your little tirade here…
Well as a “tech specialist” why don’t you have an override of the filter so you can check the sites to see if they are appropriate or not? Have you brought this up to the person that is actually in charge of the filter?
I have, actually, yes. The problem is, here in Florida, we are on the FIRN2 network which has their own web filter in place. My district could give me access to the sites that we, as a district, have blocked, but those sites that the state has blocked will still be blocked for me. So, in my case, there is actually a “double filter” in place.
I agree with Will, that such a tight filter obstructs some of the purpose for having the Internet.
I am disappointed that he stopped at that and didn’t offer a solution, unless he is implying that the solution is to throw away the filter. If that is the case, then I disagree strongly.
I go back to what I understand to be the purpose of schools in the first place: train children to be good, successful citizens. He didn’t happen to mention that. But that is what I would recommend regarding the content of the Internet.
Rules, policy, law and appropriateness were all mentioned, but nothing was said about the process of inculcating the children with the right values. The environment of political correctness would jump in at this point, apply its own filter and cripple any efforts to train students to make righteous decisions.
I expect to be labeled “religious†and have my reality-based values filtered from the arena. But there is a real world out there and too many children are run through public schools systems unprepared; with, or without web filters.
Guys – two things:
1. For most schools, e-rate money won’t be a pot of gold. It’s dependent on how poor the people in the school district is. So it is definitely a choice – you don’t have to choose e-rate!
2. If you choose to use e-rate, you are required to ONLY filter sites that are obscene and “harmful to minors.” Youtube, myspace, facebook, etc don’t fall into that category. Twitter doesn’t even come close! The problem isn’t e-rate (so stop blaming it on e-rate!). The problem is your way-too-restrictive filtering set-up, which can be easily tweeked. Again – it’s your IT department that is doing this to you – not e-rate, not the government, and not your administrators.
So change it already!
Your reply is less than helpful because it ignores 2 simple facts. 1) many states have more restrictive requirements than the federal government – such as my own. 2) many states regulate HOW schools connect requiring, for example, that schools connect via a service provider which itself is filtered.
We teachers aren’t whining JUST because our principals, school boards, and/or IT personnel are lazy, incompetent, or whatever. In many cases we have NO say in the filtering because the decision has been made at levels FAR beyond our connection.
Sorry to change the topic of the current discussion, but I was wondering if it is common to block such sights as google images? This is a high point of frustration for not only our students but our teachers and this is one area that admin won’t budge on. Is this the norm?
We no longer get over ride passwords b/c–oh no–the students might get them.
Curtis – my district whitelisted Google Images specifically after many requests, all other image sites are blocked – that was the compromise.
As an I.T. Director my biggest battle is trying to solve to a middle position to accommodate all concerned. In our District ALL access wireless or otherwise (unless stolen from the neighborhood) goes through our filters. CIPA/E-Rate requirements are vague. They mandate only that you have a filter, not how to implement it. Having said that our reasoning for filtering the way we do goes back to a lack of bandwidth and safety. Many of our Teachers want to have access to Internet Radio, many who have said they would use it only during prep times and stay connected all day long. This effectively eats at our available and expensive bandwidth resource needed for the students. We also have teachers who actively violate licensing rules with regards to music/movies yet they tend to be the biggest opponents of our filtering requirements. As for the safety issue, we have had to resort to blocking unsupervised social networks and video upload sites (such as YouTube) because we were running into a ‘fight club’ mentality. ‘Rumbles’ were scheduled or instigated through the social networks, video recorded and uploaded to the video sites with a naming convention surriptiously spread among the students so they could go online to view it. Our software does allow for customizing access, but we also require a legitimate curricular use for websites (Instructional Services reviewed) in order to get sites unblocked. We are not I.T. ogres but rather acrobats involved in a tenuous balancing act between Teachers, the law, our community and their standards, and the safety concerns for and about our students.
I believe that filters cause a lot more problems then they help solve. I believe filters should be placed in school’s to an extent but I think that filters in schools tend to be on the over protective side of things. Students need to learn to be able to use the internet wisely without a filter. I think computers in schools should be monitored if anything and not filtered. Filters put restrictions on certain sites and monitoring helps lets the student have the freedom of using the internet but with supervision. The larger issue is that teachers of all people should not have any restrictions what so ever. If the teachers have gotten to this point in their life and they still cannot use the internet properly the school by which they are hired has bigger issues then a teacher misusing a computer. Teachers should be able to access sites and information that help the learning of them and of their students. Students and teacher should both have access to sites that could be used as a valuable learning tool. With every great piece of technology there is a way to misuse it and there is not way to filter that. More teaching needs to be given to students on learning how to use the technology they have properly.
I believe that the filter is good for blocking things like Myspace and Facebook, those are things that will distract kids from doing things in school. There seems to be to much that is blocked though. When researching here sometimes you have to go to many different websites to find one thats a good website and is unblocked. But this is high school and they need to trust us to know whats right and what websites to go on, and what not to.
As a student i truly agree with the starting discussion statements made. How can we as students be taught to use the internet if 3/4 of it is blocked? I understand that facebook and myspace are not websites to be using in class,however i do not understand why we cannot access these wesites on an off hour for example.I also do not understand how websites such as youtube can be blocked from students and teachers when during numerous projects we are asked to use video clips!
I have teachers who constantly complain about the filters. Saying things like “these filters cause more problems then they do solutions.” And quite frankly i agree. I know many students who still find ways to play games on the internet and truly dont think much would change if the filters were to be banished or made less strict, besides ofcourse making projects and classroom lessons through the internet easier and less time consuming.
Wow. I’m a newbie to this. Trying to put together a presentation on blogging in education. Im the one getting an education. I’m a student teacher on Long Island, and my school has a system set up (like the one you mention in the post here.)
it seems to work very well. the students don’t have any beefs with it, and the teachers are able to block and unblock at will.
perhaps it comes down to having good line of communication between the teachers and admin. i don’t know. just a thought.
With all of the proxy services out there, students often have no problem bypassing may school filters. Maybe teachers should try using them. Here is a list of 35 of them. My favorite is “HideMyAss.com (the name says it all). It even states on their home page that it is a great service to use to bypass work/school web filters.
http://www.bestproxysites.com/
Don’t violate your AUP because of me, though 😉
Although proxy sites are an available portal a good filtering mechanism and a highly qualified tech dept will ahead of these. Just for my own entertainment, I tried the recommended proxies and all are currently block by my filter.
I guess the key phrase there is “a highly qualified tech dept. will *stay ahead of these”. I suppose that will vary from dept to dept. Tech savvy kids may be the ones causing their tech departments to play catch-up all of the time. Most kids, however, probably are kept from accessing them from proactive filter managing. Thanks for trying them and reporting back. We have no filter, so I couldn’t test its robustness myself 😉
I’m not advocating for a “filter-free” zone, but I am glad my network admin agrees with me that supervision and education need to be above technical solutions to these problems. He believes do believe that if you set up a tone where you are at war with the students about protecting computers and other technical restrictions, student will always win – “they have more time than him”.
And it appears that just this month, Congress has upgraded CIPA (S.1492) in a way that sends the message that Education, not mandatory blocking and filtering, is the best way to protect and prepare
America’s students.
Joint Statement of CoSN and ISTE Hailing Passage of
Internet Safety Education Legislation
http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=21817
Lucie deLaBruere
http://www.LearningWithLucie.com
Will,
I am both a district administrator and the IT director in our district. I am a firm believer in open access. Google images, facebook, outside email, and many other sites that most schools block, I fight to keep open.
The issue of educating our kids to be responsible is a big part of the discussion here, but not all of it. Do we put playboy magazines in our libraries and tell kids, “it is there but don’t look at it”? Some things are blocked because they are simply too big a distraction and too tempting for the kids. I block many online gaming sites simply because there is just too much traffic to them during school time. Even when something is perfectly safe for our kids, it is not imperative to provide access to it in school.
The issue of teachers being blocked is a totally different one. This is truly unacceptable and lacks any professionalism whatsoever. However, the filtering system used by our district only allows for one level of access. Unfortunately, changing this is an expense the district is not willing to take on at the moment because our filter is deemed as “effective” by our Board of Ed.
I could open YouTube. I won’t. Not because of kids. Our teachers are poorly equipped to instruct and monitor student use. I am working with staff developers to improve this, but it is a slow process. It pains me to know there is incredible content on YouTube that is hard or impossible to find elsewhere. However there is so much content that is clearly inappropriate and some downright dangerous that without extensive training of 400+ teachers I cannot in good faith open it without feeling that students are being placed in a dangerous situation.
This is an issue that has been with us since the Internet has come into our schools. There is no easy answer. Allowing kids to explore and learn in a world that teachers are not comfortable in, not knowledgeable in, and in some cases not even aware of, is not something I would recommend as an educator. Teacher preparation must improve. Teaching information literacy will be impossible until our teachers are actually information literate themselves. From my experience, most are not, including many new teachers.
@Sandy, good points all around. Hot discussions have been taking place now for quite a while on problems related to teachers not being information literate in a digital world. As someone who works in higher education, I couldn’t agree more that preservice teacher training needs to improve substantially in all areas of technology, including digital information literacies. However, often those same institutions are experiencing the very same problems that you are describing… lack of funds, lack of knowledgeable faculty, lack of room in already packed programs for dedicated courses on information technologies, political wranglings…
I don’t see sweeping changes happening any time soon, sadly. I think we are going to be subject to “trickle down” spotty or inconsistent expertise in these areas coming from new teacher graduates. So, it is all the more urgent that school districts provide their new teachers with quality professional development in this area, is this is a field that is constantly changing and evolving.
It’s all about balancing security with freedom to use all of the tech that’s available.
Good discussion you have started here, Will!
In my own district, I am very blessed, indeed, to work under a superintendent who greatly values technology. About 2 years ago, I sat down with him and the leadership team for the district and introduced them to the read/write web. The response was unabashed excitement and enthusiasm! Our super went to his office later that day to look at YouTube, and he discovered it was blocked. A quick phone call to tech support rectified that. He poured over the site, and he discovered among the music videos and laughing babies vast stores of educational resources. He made a very gutsy move and had YouTube unblocked in the district. His reasoning? YouTube was too valuable to not attempt to use responsibly.
Our district has been very supportive of my efforts to utilize Web 2.0 tools with students and teachers. The philosophy has become one that relies on high expectations for student and staff responsibility. The goal is to enable all to become proficient with very relevant, very transformative tools. The results have been astounding. Our district has come to be viewed as a benchmark for others in our state to model their own technology practices and policies after.
The key point in all of this is that it all begins with the education of the administration. Many restrictive policies are the result of irrational fears based upon a lack of familiarity and experience. Put a few tools into the hands of a school’s leaders, and walls will come down.
I certainly agree with your post! When I was in high school (3 years ago) I couldn’t go to any websites! The filters are ridiculous. After saving a paper I couldn’t even log on to my email to send myself the document to finish it later. Youtube may have a lot of entertainment videos, but others may provide educational use as well. Even for presentations many students use youtube to post their videos- but with the strict filtering this even limits students to the amount of varieties one can have in their projects. Wikipedia.. I don’t necessarily use this website for my sources but this website has certainly helped me get more ideas for papers, speeches.. etc.. Who is the judge of these filters anyway? Teachers should have the freedom to view websites.. for example. Every health teacher may teach about reproduction.. but b.c of the word “sex” many educational websites won’t even come up b.c of these filters. This basically forces all teachers to do their work at home- when a lot of teachers could save so much time by doing it at school. It kind of reminds me of a parent and child. A parent doesn’t give the child any freedom and this forces the child to want to rebel. Students don’t have any freedom for the websites that may be helpful, so when students go home they may look at irrelevant sites not pertaining to anything in school b.c they are so angry about not being able to look at anything while they are in school.
Latest in this topic… tech guy approached me by the actions of a student. The student was caught on myspace using the following proxy server: http://67.15.34.198. I am not sure if all filters propagate with the domain name & IP? Something to look into…
-Malik