Starting to notice - the only people school firewalls keep away from resources are the teachers - students know of every proxy on the planet

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Permalink Reply by Ian Carmichael on October 6, 2007 at 6:50am

Yes indeed, we need to take both sides of the question seriously. Wholesale lockdown of computer networks chokes the life out of collaborative tools and platforms. (Remember when email was banned?) However, wholesale access for all to everything can sear a life experience, and there are questions of readiness, appropriate content etc - and whilst part of our responsibility is to educate for responsible, appropriate, acceptable use, part of our responsibility is also duty of care. There are areas that I don't want indiscriminately published in the college - not so much on behalf of the tunnelers, but on behalf of those who get a glimpse of very inappropriate material.
I don't know who's ever tried this, but I found it impossible to unwatch something. I carry number of images with me I'd rather not have.
I don't have an easy solution except the need to be both flexible (with our own sand-pit to begin with..?) and vigilant. Part-answer I guess is to be sufficiently engaging and rich in our tasks/their tasks that there's neither time, nor inclination, to visit Chain Saw Massacre World (I hope I've just made that up!)

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Permalink Reply by Ian Grove-Stephensen on October 6, 2007 at 8:23am

I come to this from the content producing end. Some authors in our free community assessment platform Yacapaca integrate their courses with google docs - it is a very powerful combination. BUT some local authorities (US eq. = big school district) block google docs, rendering the work unusable. Banning google docs is just plain paranoid. There is no way you can excuse it.

Rich, you've really got me thinking about auto-proxying all external links in Yacapaca assessments so that they will work everywhere. It seems crazy, though, that we who are all trying to give kids the best education wind up actively sabotaging each others' efforts like this.

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Permalink Reply by Bob F. on October 31, 2007 at 11:35pm

Maybe at a future time I'll be more helpful, but right now I'm peeved because I cannot access this site--Classroom 2.0-- at school. It's blocked; the reason..... the following is the quote from the person in charge:
Your request to unblock the website http://classroom20.ning.com will not occur. This block will remain in place because this site has a large number of links to other web sites, which are not necessarily educational, UTube Videos and blog pages.
It seems that if they are already blocking those other "bad" sites, what's the problem with unblocking just the blogs? Why are blogs blocked in the first place? Is it because there might be a bad word?
Just my rant of the moment.
Bob

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on November 1, 2007 at 7:09am

I've commented on this before. I always think of the Wizard of Oz "Ignore the man behind the curtain" when I try to get something unblocked; who is that CIPA guy anyway and where did he get so much power? I'm lucky, I've had all but flickr and YouTube unblocked for me (out of several hundred that were initially blocked). Advice to Bob, go above the head of the "blocker". Do your research and write to the IT person? the superintendent? the school board? What are they going to do---fire you?

Advice to Jeanne--somewhere in Classroom 2.0 you will find tons of suggestions on how to save YouTube videos to other formats to use in the classroom. Also I found the latest one I wanted on TeacherTube. Don't give up!! Keep fighting and don't expect someone else to do it, they won't! N

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Permalink Reply by Jeanie on November 1, 2007 at 3:51am

Wow! Aren't you exactly right! I get so frustrated when I find something on youtube that I can use but can't. Then, to top out the frustration, I took the kids to the lab and some kid got on a porno site! This was a SIXTH grader. I can't show them a video, but he can look at porn???

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Permalink Reply by Mark Rees on November 24, 2007 at 11:17pm

Funny you should mention this. The school I work at has that exact problem. The only people not able to circumvent the system are the teachers. The students do so with impunity whilst teachers, already unfamiliar with sites such as youtube, are unable to acess them and therefore unable to see how useful a teaching tool they are.
It seems to me that parents and students should take more ownership/responsibility for the sites they visit and schools should not have to go to the nth degree to block every site that even vaguely mentions porn or virii. Of course I work in a senior school, of mostly responsible students, that would make an acceptable use policy easier to implement.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on December 7, 2007 at 9:01am

I agree that there are a number of schools that block things unnecessarily but let me give you the Technical/Administrator side of the story. Here's part of an email I sent out to everyone in our district.

"I want to address the email and internet filtering issue. As some of you are aware from last years discussion in the moodle forum we must have filters in order to qualify for the funding we use to provide you with internet access. In short, if we don't put the filters back online we won't receive the money to give you any internet access at all. This does mean that your outside email accounts will not be accessible, as well as facebook, myspace, bebo, and YouTube. Other things that will be filtered are entertainment sites that hog our bandwidth or sites that have no educational value. Bandwidth is our connection to the internet. It only allows so much data to pass through at a time. We have the largest connection to the internet we can get in this area but the entire connection can be taken up completely by a dozen people watching YouTube videos or two dozen people listening to internet radio. Our focus is to provide you with access to websites that will enhance your education and allow you to become proficient in the use of technology for business and learning applications. If you feel that one of the websites that is blocked would, for some valid reason, enhance your education, email the URL to me along with how you would use it to achieve that purpose. Before I get a flood of emails telling me how you would use YouTube and Facebook to enhance your education let me just tell you up front that I'm aware of the educational value of both websites and they do not outweigh the negative or legal implications of allowing you unrestricted access to them. However because I'm aware of the educational value of YouTube I will not be blocking your teacher's access to it. If you believe that you've found a video on YouTube that your teacher could use in the classroom feel free to email them the link and they can determine if they want to use it."

Now this was a simple explanation I sent out to everyone to explain our policies. Are things sometimes blocked that have educational value, absolutely but unless someone has found a perfect world to live in that's life. You need to contact your technical people or adminstrators and say, "Look this is what I want to use and this is how I want to use it. If you can't give it to me then buy something that will let me do the same thing." Many of the "Free" sites have sections with adult material that YOU don't see but some student will find. As for delicious and digg and the like blocking them is an absolute must because if you would bother to do a search for vulgar things on there you would realize that there's more crap on there then good things.

One other note about blocking teachers from things. More than likely those of you here are good teachers and have the best interest of your students in mind. However most of you probably know teachers in your building that are there because of the paycheck and they get summers off. These are the teachers that make $500 a month selling stuff on ebay from school. They're also the teachers that access porn, watch TV, and do other things that are completely non-school related. More than likely your technical people have the best interest of your students in mind as well, but a few stupid people can ruin it for everyone.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on December 7, 2007 at 9:16am

I knew this, I agree and well said. My frustration lie in blanket blocking of everything Web 2.0, from teacher and class blogs to web applications--but I'm getting over it! Our district is very good at unblocking everything I need for my teaching and personal development----I don't know if bandwidth is an issue in our district but that is good to know. Over the last several years we've had speedy service 24/7. We never have outages, so all and all I think things are going good.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on December 7, 2007 at 9:26am

Check out ePals, they have blogging free and secured.

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Aldrich on December 7, 2007 at 12:57pm

And just why do you believe you need to block YouTube, FaceBook et al. for legal reasons? That's bunk. Neither CIPA nor any state law I know of would require blocking of those sites as a prerequisite for e-rate funding. At least you allow teachers to use YouTube, which is nicer than my district.

What you said about delicious and digg made me laugh. I use both sites extensively and have never seen any inappropriate pictures (which is what CIPA requires us to filter) on either. We don't have to keep kids from typing in dirty search terms, we just have to work to make sure they don't see dirty pictures. Don't you know why kids of my era were so interested in National Geographic or certain parts of the encyclopedia? Heck, we even dog-eared pages of some of the more comprehensive dictionaries that included words we thought were funny to look up. Should we throw those out too?

I'm interested in your thoughts on bandwidth and how we can better manage it. The prevailing philosophy seems to be akin to saying, "Highway X is too crowded, so we're getting rid of some of the exits to popular places." Or how about, "We've got too many people coming to our football games, so we're restricting access to just our faculty and staff." Huh? Can't we find tools that help us monitor and regulate the bandwidth use of individual users? Can't we inform people (as you did here) about how they can help keep the tubes from getting clogged up?

As far as professionals acting unprofessionally, it seems that the best way to deal with them is administrative discipline rather than internet filters that keep other teachers from accessing great resources.

There is a huge divide right now between the tech admins and the teachers, and we need to restore some balance to the relationship. Teachers are here to teach the kids. Tech admins are here to help us have the best tech resources we can have so that we can do our job as well as possible.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on December 10, 2007 at 7:32am

From the URL you referenced:

"Schools and libraries subject to CIPA are required to adopt and implement a policy addressing: (a) access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet; (b) the safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications; (c) unauthorized access, including so-called “hacking,” and other unlawful activities by minors online; (d) unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors; and (e) restricting minors’ access to materials harmful to them."

Please read past the first bullet. I believe that addressed the first half of your post, let me know if you need more on that.

As for bandwidth, let me try to use the same analogy that you did. "Highway X (the Information Super Highway) is too crowded. The school pays the toll for all access to the highway from our on ramp. We want to make sure that all drivers have the quickest access to all educational material with the least likelyhood of having a wreck or getting off at the wrong exit. So let's block all exits that have little or no educational value."

Bandwidth regulation tools would hit teachers that use educational tools effectively much harder then filters do. Things like TeacherTube would be cut with bandwidth monitors and for the teachers that don't use the Internet it would waste available bandwidth. We can inform all we want but the fact is that students will always break rules and generally only care about themselves. Which means that even if they know that by watching that music video they are hampering other peoples access they will still do it anyway (this is from experience not speculation.)

But when the administrators tell you to just block it so they don't have to deal with it. So in essence, blocking it is the administrative discipline.

I agree that there is a huge divide between tech admins and teachers and that's why I send out emails like the one I did, and why I come to this site, and why I rarely keep my mouth shut. I don't know what your school's situation is like but mine is in declining enrollment and my budget was cut to 50% of what it was last year. That means that I have to do whatever I can to maximize the resources we have so that we can get the best tech resources we can possibly have.

I know that sometimes we seem like Nazi's but we really are trying to do the best thing for you and your students, the big picture is often hard to see, but that's the only thing that your tech people can afford to look at. If you could get a number of your teachers to agree that, let's say, social networking would be a great thing that your students could use. Then you could all go to your tech people, explain what they want and they would find a safe, monitored, probably educational social networking site that they would probably have to pay for so you could use it. The problem comes when every teacher wants to use a different tool, if it's really the best you should be able to develop a following of other teachers and show proof that the tool effectively increases education.

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Aldrich on December 10, 2007 at 7:46am

Luke, I did read past the first bullet, and I've read the full text of CIPA as well. It requires comprehensive policies, but very little filtering (as I stated earlier, just filtering for obscene images). The policy can (and should, in my opinion) be teaching about the issues, addressing problems as they came up, and giving students information management skills they will use for their whole lives. Hiding behind CIPA or e-rate funding as an excuse to block YouTube and Facebook is either being misinformed or lying. Here are some good ideas on "best practices" for complying with the law.

I appreciate you being in conversation on this. And as far as bandwidth goes, do you know of any tools that could be used to monitor the bandwidth use of individual accounts?

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