Do you have internet at your school? And is just about everything blocked?

[femmocrat]

I am an art teacher in a public school district. The tech director has blocked the entire category of "Arts/Entertainment"! They have also blocked most image sites (like Google images).

I can't do any reseach or print out any reproductions for my lessons. This has me irate! Yes, I have asked them to unblock it. They replied that they would have to unblock it for everyone, including students. So, I asked them to unblock specific sites (e.g., the Warhol museum) and never received a reply. :grr:

An elementary science teacher has told me that they can't even do research on THE MOON!

Does anyone know if general categories or specific sites can be unblocked for teachers' use while keeping the kiddies from seeing (gasp!) nude photos?

[madeline_con]

1. I'm sure certain users could be allowed more freedom.

I've found most of the school "tech guys" in my area don't have much tech knowledge.

[femmocrat]

2. It's downright insulting.

I'm not going to show any offensive material to the students. Hell, they can't even see my computer screen! I just want to be able to supplement my lessons with some material on the artists!

[madeline_con]

3. You could put the art you want them to see on a CD and show it

to them via your screen, (if you have a set up that allows you to show what's on your screen to the group) or reproduce the Cd so each student or small groups have access. :shrug:

You'd be surprised how many fellow teachers might view porn at work if they could. :eyes:

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Commondreams was blocked at a public middle school where I subbed three years ago.

You could go on freerepublic and foxnews.

It was very frustrating.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Why were you surfing to CommonDreams at school?

For that matter, why go to freerepublic ever? LOL

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. They can unblock any site we ask for in my district

All we have to do is make a request and they unblock for us.

Well, I doubt they would unblock kiddie porn but I have never asked for that. :)

[tinymontgomery]

7. Surprisingly Ours is pretty open

Even allows youtube which suppressed me.

[RKP5637]

8. It sounds like your tech director has limited knowledge, limited sw, both and/or

a control freak paranoid administration. What your tech director is doing is a cop out. They should be able to unblock by your IP address and if security is a paranoid trip in your district they could even use https (SSL). What a limiting experience...

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. If you have..

...two networks, it's easy. We have two networks a faculty one, with a WPA password, and an open one for the public, students included, so that the student laptops have very limited access to printers, especially color printers. (Print costs were astronomical before this.)

Your IT people probably bought an off-the-shelf solution from someone like TrendMicro or Barracuda, who basically block everything. Face it, no one ever got fired, no vendor failed to get adopted, for having too-restrictive policies,

[Ten Bears]

10. Ask your students to get you to those sites...

...Most students know how to beat the filters. The only people the filters block are the teachers.

[RKP5637]

11. Exactly!

[NYC_SKP]

12. I brought my ATT Wireless connect card to class to get around it...

In my experience, the IT dept is filled with people without any classroom teaching experience.

It's their way or the highway.

I got around it MY way.

I know this won't likely help you. Maybe you need to go over his/her head.

:patriot:

[DKRC]

13. Use a proxy site

Any of the middle school/high school students should be able to give you some good sites that will mask your IP so you can go where you need. That's what the kids in my daughter's HS do to get around the blocks.

[donco6]

14. Ours isn't that tight.

We've always been able to open specific sites when we want. But things like Facebook and Twitter are off limits.

[alp227]

15. My schools blocked EVERYTHING "noneducational"...including social networking sites/proxies

That was a very prudent blocking policy that they had right there. Back in freshman year I remember that kids used proxies all the time to go on MySpace. Then apparently the district head honchos found out and blocked every darn proxy they could find. Blogs, gaming sites, and I think some forum sites were also banned.

[LWolf]

16. We have the internet, and it is heavily filtered.

Not as heavily filtered as yours. My students can access plenty of different sites for research. Since our library doesn't have good, up-to-date reference books, that's about all they've got. I spend a lot of time on what constitutes a valid source, and I often do the googling for them and present them with a list of links, if I'm in a hurry. And, when it comes to computer use, we are always in a hurry. Our lab is heavily scheduled.

For teachers, though, our tech department modified the filters about a year ago. I can't get to everything, but I can get to images, youtube, etc. that I didn't used to be able to.

I can put those things on the projector for all, if we are using them in a whole-class lesson, or print stuff for small groups.

[Catshrink]

17. Teachers have different priviledge than students

I can access youtube and images and they can't. I use a lot of youtube clips for science. They've tightened things up a little this year -- no ebay -- but we're better off than most. On occasion I've needed to have a site unblocked and that hasn't been a problem -- they ask why I need it, I explain, they unblock.

We ran into a problem with a quarter project on science careers -- all the job search sites were blocked (guess they didn't want teachers looking for work!). The kids just had to do work at home or use other sites. The job search sites have pretty good job descriptions but they made out okay.

Hey, I can even DU, but I only do it during lunch.

[Jokerman]

18. Some answers from a district tech director.

I don't know the specific filter that your school uses but here are some general answers:

MOST filters have some way to set different policies for students and staff or at least make exceptions. Your IT people may not know how to do this, they may not have the time or, it may not work correctly. We block web-based email and most blogs and forums for students while leaving them open for teachers. With our system it isn't unusual for a workstation to update the policies slowly or not at all. Meaning that a PC that has just had a student log out and a teacher log in may continue to apply the previous restrictions. This causes many "Ms. Smith can get to gmail but I can't - why do you hate me?" type of complaints.

I get several requests to grant access to sites every week and I try to be reasonable. If they want a site open for students, it has to be approved by the building principal. I actually had a business teacher ask for all gun sites to be unblocked so a student could do his entrepreneur project on opening a gun store. The principal said no.

Sometimes it's about bandwidth. We used to let the teachers go to sites where they could download or stream music. Now, with on-line testing, an internet connection that is almost fully utilized and a budget that won't let us add any more, I've had to block these sites. One teacher downloading music may not bring the system down but 10 or 20 concurrent streams can cause real problems. Blocking music and NCAA tournament video gets my name cursed quite often but it keeps the network up for educational use.

As a big fan of free speech and free expression I don't really like having this responsibility but when it gets right down to it, this is a private network dedicated to education, any other use is just icing on the cake. If your IT department claims that they can't make exceptions, they either have a lousy filter system or they're just making excuses.

By the way, the rumor that I block fox news has no basis in fact. That was...um, a network error. Yea, that's the ticket.


ON EDIT:

A really good filter will force a "google safe search" that lets users get to school appropriate sites and images while blocking others.

[Jkid]

19. If I was a principal I would unblock everything.

Except for pornograhy and social networking. Because not everyone has a computer or has a ISP nor a nearby library near their home that they can simply walk to without a car.

[Name removed]

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