Internet Filtering
30 08 2007I share an office at SCOCA with Melissa, who is our Curriculum/Professional Development/Distance Learning Coordinator. We were talking about blogs yesterday and I mentioned John Schinker’s Taste of Tech. She already subscribes to John Rundag’s and Alvin’s blogs. She mentioned that just that morning she had read John’s post about Internet filtering, but didn’t realize whose blog it was. This lead us into a conversation about blocking web sites and what a pain it can be for teachers.
My sister is secretary to one of the presidents of Mountaineer Gas, and the company also employs Internet filtering, but not to the extent that most schools do. At least I can send her a flickr or YouTube link and she can view it from work. I had a conversation with one of their IT guys at a funeral a few years ago, and he asked me a lot of questions on how SCOCA filters traffic. Like most ITC sites in Ohio now, we leave the filtering up to each school district.
There really is no easy answer. Sometimes I think filtering needs to be put into place for the teachers as much as the students, and I’m not just talking about adult sites. I remember one tech coordinator telling me that one of their teachers ran his eBay auction site completely on school time.
In our conversation yesterday, Melissa told me that a teacher couldn’t use a video he found on YouTube for his science class. I think one way an ITC like SCOCA could help is by having a procedure to allow teachers to embed YouTube Video into a simple web app on our own site, which isn’t blocked. To make it “legal” a teacher would log into our site using their DASL account and then simply enter a title and the YouTube URL. The web app would create the embed code and then show the video on our site. All of the video URLs could be placed in a database so that the video could be accessed anytime. I looked into this for a few minutes today, and immediately I knew one problem is that at the end of a YouTube video there are thumbnails listed for “related video”, and who knows what stuff students could find by following those. I did a little more digging and found that you can set a simple parameter in the URL so that the related thumbnails don’t show. You can test this yourself by adding &rel=0 at the end of any YouTube video URL.
I’ll be looking into the viability of a project like this after I finish the mapping project. Melissa seems to think it would be a valuable service from SCOCA, and it would relate somewhat to the other project I mentioned about using Google maps and flickr for class projects.
technorati tags:k-12, internet filtering, youtube
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I agree that there are some teachers that would do anything to get around the filter. I give out override codes to administrators and question some of the sites they unblock on a daily basis.
At first. we were only blocking pornography. Then, we started blocking sites due to bandwidth issues. Now that almost all of our schools are on fiber, I am going to address this issue with our administrators.
The bottom line is that teachers should be supervising what the students are doing on the computers. The best filter is the teacher telling the students what they should and should not be doing.
Also, the superintendent should tell the administrators what they should be doing on their computers.
I have been working with the filtering end of things for some time now and I can say that it doesn’t stop people from looking at inappropriate sites. I see thousands of attempts a day where people are trying to access such sites, luckily most are caught by the filter. The problem is when a teacher puts their override user name and password on a post-it note on the side of their monitor the kids go to town. I have seen everything from gambling to pornography, it never ceases to amaze me what people are willing to do in a public place.