CNet has an interesting article about how students are using internet proxies to get around school filtering systems and access banned sites like MySpace.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this.
That’s what I thought. A filter is a wondeful thing to prevent students from randomly accessing some internet sites. Or to deter students from getting access to specific sites easily. However, there are so many ways to get around filters, that they will hardly to more than present an interesting challenge to enterprising students. Additionally, they do little to ‘protect’ students when they access the internet from the library, Starbucks or home.
I don’t have a beef with internet filters. I advocate using them. What I do have issues with is when that is the only step that a school takes when it comes to internet safety. A filter is woefully inadequate. The best ‘filter’ is actually good judgement, which only comes about through education.
To be honest, I’m pretty impressed with ‘Ryan’, the featured student in the article. He set up his own proxy server on his home computer to get free reign of the internet from school. I’ve done that before for other reasons, and it requires some decent knowledge of how internet traffic functions. Obviously the IT department will be keeping an eye on him, but I’d bet that he could get around the school filters again without breaking a sweat. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he already has another solution in place. So what’s to stop him from doing it? Nothing, except fear of getting caught. And that’s what we’re teaching many of our students. It’s fine to do, so long as you don’t get caught.
I think we can do better.
5/15/2006
WOW! That is a tool I can use as a teacher! They filter out sites that I could really use and now I will have access to them again! I agree that people put up a filter thinking it will solve all the issues without thinking what they will hamper.
5/15/2006
Sometimes I fire from the hip. What I mean is my kids can find half naked women when searching for honey bees and I can’t log into my dot mac account. Filters can help, but are hurtful as well.
Hi there,
I found your blog today and I was suprised to see that teachers are so much into web technology (especially the Web 2.0 technologies). I think it’s great that you and your colleagues make use of it. I remember my school days and we actually had a teacher back then who said (quote): “The Internet will go as fast as it came”. Well, I’d love to see that teacher again sometime…
Anyway, since you guys are familiar with web technologies I was wondering if you might be interested in Pageflakes. It’s a personalized start page (yes, I know, there are quite a few out there). However, it’s not just a start page for a single user but also for teams and groups. I thought it might be an interesting tool for you and your colleagues to create shared pages where you add note modules, tasks and todo lists, shared contacts, schedules and news feeds. It’s quite simple - just go to http://www.pageflakes.com, get a free account and then setup your own, personalized page. You can then either leave it in “private” mode, or change it to “shared” (invited teacher colleagues can use and edit it) or “publish” (everyone can see it, but only you can edit it).
Please feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions or questions.
With best wishes
Tegan Harris
6/8/2006
Ok so we have something that kids are dying to use, that supports authentic writing, 21 century comminication and future job skills and so much more. And the answer is to block it from the students. Instead of teachers being police, how about teaching kids ethics of using sites like myspace and the ramifications of such incredible access to personal information.
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