Comments on: Tech coordinator pushback

By: Jeremy Aldrich

Jeremy Aldrich — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Wouldn’t it be something if the only places that students would be using the Internet were at school and, later in life, at work? If that were the case, filtering in school would make sense.

But that ain’t reality.

Our students are engaging in risky Internet behaviors NOW, outside of school on the many internet-connected computers beyond our four walls. How will they learn to be safe? I wonder if these same coordinators were in charge of shop classes if they’d remove all the dangerous equipment and just TELL the kids how they should safely use shop tools, on their own time of course.

It reminds me of an old post I wrote called “What We Won’t Do” – http://globalvirtual.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-we-wont-do.html

By: Eric Bouvier

Eric Bouvier — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I’m a Tech Director with an office located in the library of my High School. Everyday I see kids on web sites that I know are blocked by our content filter. They all know the work arounds for our system and essentially have MORE access to the web than our teachers do! This is my problem with content filtering at this level. If the kids can get to these sites anyways, why filter anything but what we are required to by law? The principal and I have had discussions about removing the filtering and placing the onus of responsibility where it belongs, on the students.

By: Flourish Klink

Flourish Klink — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

This would be reasonable if we expected employers to provide guidance the way that we expect schools to. But we assume that schools ought to give some kind of moral or practical guidance in dealing with the realities of the world, and you can’t give guidance without freedom to show what you’re guiding people to and away from.

By: Tsakshaug

Tsakshaug — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

The big issue with blocking and filtering is if we are in compliance with federal filtering regulations. Other than that, and a few other things, we should have the network open. The computer is a teaching/learning tool, I don’t see many people censoring sections of the encyclopedia.
In school, as at home, Internet use needs to be monitored. I like to use the playground analogy. When we have young kids, we tend to watch them very closely, and tend to be at their side when at parks and playgrounds. In time, we can observe them play with others and we monitor them. After awhile, we let them ride their bikes to the park with friends, with restrictions and after several more years they are on their own.
This is how we need to monitor Internet use. Elementary schools need to watch the students, but use digital citizenship lessons in web searches, teach digital literacy and things like that.
I get many teachers asking me to block sites that their kids get onto in their classroom..I tend to think of this as a classroom supervision issue. Tell the kid to get off the site or computer. How is that different than the student reading a book unrelated to class in your class?

By: Holly

Holly — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I consider myself extremely technology apt as far as college students (and tech consultant interns) go and a huge part of my interest in computers was piqued during middle school through the “original” social networks: AOL Instant Messenger, Geocities web pages, and subsequently MySpace and Facebook. Sure it looks like we’re fooling around with nonsense on those pages that are supposed to be blocked but we might just be discovering the newest Web 2.0 tool or doing independent research that’s much more important to us (for all of the junk on YouTube there ARE very informative videos!).

I agree its more of a supervision and motivation issue. As far as classroom use is concerned – 3 of my 4 professors this semester have banned laptops in their classes. In the one class that hasn’t I admittedly sit in the back and work on other things on my computer but I still am able to chime in with relevant “Googled” information when the professor doesn’t have an answer. I also have one of the highest grades in the class. I’ve found this is very common in our business school: Those kids doing programming and following the stock market in class are often the ones who are still making the highest grades. For the record, in the classes that I can’t use my computer, we can still access the internet on our PDAs.

By: Richard Byrne

Richard Byrne — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I recently had a similar conversation with my district’s technology administrators. Their biggest concern was students not being on task because they’re on a gaming or social networking website. As a classroom teacher, my response was that this reflects a problem with classroom management and or lesson plan effectiveness. In short, if a teacher is using the Internet solely as a reference tool the students are likely to wander off task. If the teacher designs an engaging lesson plan using the Internet then students are less likely to wander off task.

A second thought that I have about this conversation is rooted in my desire to help my students cross the digital divide. I teach in a poor, rural school district in which less than 50% of students have Internet access at home (2007 district survey of students and parents). For most of my students the only place that they can reliably access the Internet is at school. If we continue to block students from the Internet (at this point anything with a .blogspot address is blocked) we are putting them behind their peers on the other side of the digital divide.

By: Alby

Alby — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Block nothing at all.

Then send a list of sites visited home to parents at the end of each month.

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Interesting timing on this posts. I was in a meeting with regional technology directors recently and what is written above was pretty much what the discussion centered on.

The stance taken by some technology directors (not all) was that if something goes wrong, the law states that responsibility goes back to them. For that reason, they are suspect to teacher overrides and opening sites. Semi-understandable.

Education, however, should not be reactive. We need to train our teachers in proper classroom management when it comes to technology. Teachers must be mobile and guide students while on the web. My key word is professionalism. Teachers should be able to be trusted with filter overrides for short term uses. Resources with potentially great value should be considered by a district’s technology and/or administrative team so that many opinions can be taken into consideration.

By: Jerry Swiatek

Jerry Swiatek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I’ll have to agree with, basically, all of the comments here. My situation is a little different. Here in Florida, our district is on the FIRN network, meaning the state provides our bandwidth. Not only is there a filter on the district level, but there is an additional filter on the STATE level. We cannot get to many blogging sites, we cannot use Google images…we can’t even get to the new Life Archive at Google. There are SO many great teaching resources blocked in this state that it is ridiculous. The students, of course, have no problems getting around the filters in place using proxy sites, but as teachers, are we ethically bound to not use these proxy sites even if we are accessing educational materials? As the tech specialist for the school, I have been tempted many times to show teachers how to bypass the filter, but have not…

By: Carl Anderson

Carl Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

block websites, ban books, censor films…all the same

One problem I have come to understand is that most filtering is not done to protect the students anyway, it is to insure that teachers and schools are not held liable for things kids do online. Mostly this is done out of fear. We often block things we don’t fully understand. Social networking sites are a prime example.