What sites/apps does your school block?

Currently, our school is pretty much wide open to what the students can do at school with their personal laptops or on school computers. They chat (often in class), download music, movies and videos and can visit any site that they want for the most part (not exactly what I would allow but the head of tech seems fine with this).

We're a PK-12 private school so most of our high school students have their own laptops.

Because these activities has killed our bandwidth, we're finally looking at blocking some of these sites. I'm just wondering what sites and applications does your school block?

Our quick list is:
1) File sharing programs/P2P
2) Messenger/chat programs
3) Bit torrent
4) MySpace/Facebook

Thanks for any other suggestions that you may have!

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Permalink Reply by CC Long on May 11, 2008 at 9:39am

Students are not allowed to bring personal laptops to school in our district nor are they allowed to use cellphones or IPODs during school hours. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube are blocked. We do have access to Wikispaces, Blogger, and Twitter.

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Permalink Reply by Helen on May 12, 2008 at 10:52am

Timely Post! A resource is only as good as the filter that permits it....so we are trying a new thing at OOPS: Our Overnight Planning System to check links before recommending them through our blog/webpage/workshop. We have our Link check team of educators who help us by taking a cyber-second to check link(s) against your district filter. Here is the link we are checking now.

Link to Check: http://www.zoho.com

BTW: any Classroom 2.0 readers: pls. let me know if this link works on your fiter!
Helen :)

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Permalink Reply by CC Long on May 12, 2008 at 1:16pm

Yes, I can open Zoho in my school district.

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Permalink Reply by Kelley Irish on May 12, 2008 at 6:33pm

We block by site : Myspace, Meebo, Beebo, Facebook, Xanga
We also only allow rated sites- which unfortunately boots me off Asterpix

Aslo had to block http://www.cantbustme.com/, and a few other sites that kids use to get past the blocks.

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Permalink Reply by Derwin Kitch on May 13, 2008 at 10:35am

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Sounds like there are a lot of students in high school (I'm in the elementary) here using messenger programs to chat during class and download movies and songs. It's killing the bandwidth and it's forcing us to come up with a pretty comprehensive list of site and apps to block.

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Permalink Reply by Marty Caise on January 7, 2009 at 2:18pm

We currently block all of these from student use. We do have the flexibility however to open YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites for administrative use. We have had some difficulty with Wikipedia because of the content. Our filtering system also blocks high bandwidth sites like those with large amounts of streaming video. This creates problems for teachers who use these sites in their instruction. We do have a reporting system which allows teachers to request specific sites to be unblocked. Once received it is reviewed by committee and released if it has educational value. We are also working towards an override capability where teachers can view blocked sites for a short time period, but this also requires additional accountability in the form of the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy).

As a rule in our school district no personal laptops are allowed. I do not envy you with the problems you are probably having with your network because of what students bring in on their laptops. There are network appliances and systems like Cicso Clean Sweep and Cisco Security agent which can prevent access to devices that do not meet your network minimum requirements such as patch level or virus definitions. this of course will be met with some resistance from students ignorant teachers and parents. Do your homework and communicate with these groups so you can keep your network resources stable and functional for those who need it.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bartel on January 7, 2009 at 6:40pm

We have gone to a "Whitelist" system verses a "Blacklist". We were blocking programs left and right and couldn't stay ahead of the problems and hacking. The whitelist allows only teachers to open certain sites specific to their class. My opinion is that we need to teach our kids to make good choices and having large areas blocked is tough to do so. Atleast as a teacher I can still have full access.

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Permalink Reply by Lyn on August 30, 2009 at 5:17am

We just found out the district is blocking Wikispaces. I am really disappointed. The district got it's own domain on wikispaces and is forcing everyone to host theirs on that site, but certain functionalities are lost and we don't have ultimate control over the design of our pages.

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Permalink Reply by Rich White on August 30, 2009 at 10:23pm

It might be easier to list the things that are not blocked - first commentor about has it right ... any "Real World" devices or social sites are blocked or not allowed for the most part.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 31, 2009 at 4:58pm

Our district blocks very little (YouTube open for teachers), Facebook, MySpace etc. If you come across something that is blocked the pop up allows you to request having it opened from the CIPA rep. Be sure you don't just accept the blocking if you really feel you need the site---talk to someone!!