Of course the benefits to these blocking programs is that they protect students and others from inappropriate and unsafe sites and programs. The drawback is that some of the blocked sites are beneficial for educational uses.
A new assignment for myself: investigate my school district's policy on blocking and unblocking sites, because I have no idea who is responsible for monitoring and modifying this. (Except for knowing that someone in IT probably is in charge.) It's easy to just adapt to these security issues rather than confronting them by working to have some of these valuable tools unlocked.
I found a blog Once Upon a Teacher that talked about an annual dinner his school has before the start of the school year for new teachers. They Skyped in a leadership member who was unable to attend the dinner. Of course, in the next paragraph, at my school "it is blocked by security at this time. I wonder how many other school districts have it blocked?" Web 2.0 can connect students globally. We need to find a way to balance the access with safety and security.
2 comments:
Ilene,
I too am frustrated with my school district an it's blocked sites. I can not load the Pillsbury (as in cakes) site. It must be the naked dough boy. I know it is important that the children are protected from many of these sites, but the Pillsbury site?
Last year I subscribed to the National Geographic for Young Learners. In April I was sent a card with my student packets asking me to critic the program. I was unable to critic the program from school due to securtiy blacks. very frustrating.
There's no denying that web 2.0 tools are cool for educational use, and you can find some good options that work for education out there...for example, if you want to use wikis in your classroom, pbwiki.com can be set up so it's password-protected, ad-free, and with privacy options.
Of course I don't know what your district's block/unblock policy is for websites, but if you could go in with something like pbwiki that could have some security/child safety controls set up on it, maybe your district's IT dept. would be more likely to let you and your kids use it in class.
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