I have provided areas where teachers can have unfiltered access and teachers know that these areas function differently.

I am only blocking what CIPA requires. Other than that, someone who goes somewhere inappropriately will be dealt with through the procedures outlined in the AUP. Inappropriate use is a discipline issue - not a technology issue.

That’s all well and good, but I’m not 12 years old. I don’t understand why teachers can’t have a different level of access from students.

Trust is very much the issue.

diane

First the issue of censorship vs. trust. At a January education technology conference, I was asked to justify the “censorship” inherent in Internet filtering. The keynote address focused on the “Information Super-highway” so I took that as my start point. Would any responsible Driver Ed instructor hand the keys of a sports car to a 12-year-old, sit him in the driver seat with a couple of buddies in the passenger seats, send him out on the Santa Anna Expy. (read Hwy 401), at rush hour and feel completely confident with the safety of this young people because each had signed a note promising to obey all the rules of the road. Of course not. The issue is not trust in the students or censorship. The issue is a level of development and judgment that allows a person to make good decisions and to protect themselves. The Internet can be a scary, dangerous highway for a 12-year-old.

Next, regarding “tiered filter”. Our company manages the content filtering for the London Grid for Learning. This is a 2,800 school, 1.5 million student/device Internet-based network stretching across the Greater London region. The student users range from 6 to 46-years of age. There are vast differences in culture, religious and developmental sensitivities, as well as the obvious age differences.

To manage this, more than 200 different filtering policies (the rules by which a specific user may access resources on the Internet) were created. These rules are set by the individual school boards, but centrally data based. There are more than 7000 different “groups” of users. Samples of “user groups” include:
1. Each different grade is a group,
2. All teachers are grouped by grade level,
3. All Principal/V.P./Department Heads are assigned a separate group,
4. There are more than 1,000 “special” groups (E.g. Sex Ed. specialists),

The simple arithmetic indicates more than 1.4 million filtering variations are available. Even these can be “overridden” by authorized teachers and/or parents who wish a young student to have access to specific sites/data that the policy denies. All of this is centrally supported by network experts in terms of technology, but the system is locally administered at the school level, using just an Internet browser and authorised passwords.

This London Grid is filtering technology to the nth degree, but it is a useful demonstration. The national government was committed to advanced technology as a key component of 21st century learning. But they had been advised that the legal and political liability was too great. By developing this capability, Internet filtering became an enabling capability, not a limiting or disabling one.

Finally, there is a wonderful opportunity to “filtering in” (create allow lists) specific sites for specific grade levels, subjects or lessons. Our company’s particular method includes reviewing and categorizing more than 1 million new URLs each day. We have created databases of specific education sites for specific purposes. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to “target search” all the Grade 8 math lessons posted in Liverpool, England; or Grade 10-level history sites from Chennai, India; or show Grade 5 level students the wonders of marine biology, presented on-line from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. All these can be pre-categorized and allocated to education sites.

A final, light-hearted note. In the first week of school, last September, our technical support desk reported more than 20,000 new “proxy anonymizers” sites every day. These are “fake” websites set up strictly to hide identity and allow students to bypass the filtering system. Our system seeks out these “fake” sites and denies students access. It becomes a great game to stay ahead of inquisitive, energetic, young minds. When we asked the authorities if this obvious attempt to bypass the system was a concern, they thought the opposite. These are the bight, technical minds of tomorrow. These are students getting a little “Cyber-exercise”.

The basic philosophy is that we will never filter everything out, therefore, we should concentrate our efforts on educating the kids about how to access the web responsibly. Every year we have a few students who visit inappropriate sites, and the typical consequence is loss of the laptop, or possibly keeping the laptop without any access to the web. As far as I am concerned, this approach has worked relatively well. There are always calls from small groups of parents for filtering, but they tend to remain isolated groups.

I do believe that we need a better plan for training the teachers. It is fine to say that we educate the students about responsible use, but many teachers don’t know enough to do this well. They basically say “Don’t go to bad sites or you will use your laptop.” What about sharing too much info on Facebook? That type of thing is probably not mentioned by the majority. Even if the kids are not visiting Facebook during school time, we are providing a laptop and hoping that they will use it. We hold them responsible for appropriate use of the laptop at home, so we should be preparing them to use it appropriately in a variety on contexts. I think that we could do a great job if every teacher was trained to teach the kids responsible use, then given refresher updates every year or two as new technology develops.

“Ideally, I think parents should be able to login to the web portal of the district’s student information system (PowerSchool or another variant) and in addition to viewing info on student attendance, grades, cafeteria balance, and homework assignments, parents (as well as students, teachers and administrators) should be able to view a COMPLETE listing of websites accessed via the student’s official district login account. That type of an accountability system is POSSIBLE with today’s technologies, but I haven’t seen it being implemented… YET.”

We are doing just this. We have been in a totally 1:1 laptop initiative for 2 years now at CA (1:1 for 11 years with desktops and laptops combined) and students must authenticate to get onto their laptops at home or school and from the very moment they get onto the web, their every move is monitored and recorded. All parents have access to this information as well as school personnel. We block only Facebook for bandwidth reasons on campus and try our best to educate responsible Internet use through classroom policies and our school AUP. We haven’t prevented every breech, but once a student realizes that inappropriate use of their laptop will be associated with loss of it for a week or so- there is often a dramatic change in behavior. Parent monitoring and buy-in has also been helpful with this. I believe we developed the code for this in-house.

As for the comment about the qualification of “technicians” to decide what is educationally critical and appropriate, I would recommend rethinking that approach since it’s those very technicians who can or cannot make these types of requests happen. Never discount the abilities and insights of your IT staff.

Cindy,
The plan to incorporate web training along with differentiated permissions is a terrific idea. It’s one huge carrot that just might get teachers to participate in training that is long overdue…

Regarding Flickr: I’m trying to teach my students responsible digital citizenship. Rather than using Google images, I’m pointing them to Creative Commons. If Flickr were blocked, they’d lose that option. As with anything else, responsible use should be the goal, not filtering (which many of the kids know how to circumvent, anyway!)

In regards to filtered content, we have a tiered filtering system for teachers using Bess; certain sites are flagged with a cautious green warning from the Bess filter and teachers must click through this warning page to view most blogs, wikis etc. Building ET’s can override any red Bess warning pages for teachers if needed.

In a related area, our district has or had (it’s not being supported currently by our technology department?!) a great way for teachers to upload and share digital content for parents teachers, and students using a secure web portal. You can see a voice thread demo of it here: http://voicethread.com/share/23210/

All moves in the right direction…

In order for a senior high school to qualify for minimal filtering, the staff must first participate in web-awareness training and the school must have a specific plan in place, which typically includes parent communication.

We also have policies in place to address posting of student work online in keeping with our provincial privacy legislation and to address code of conduct for staff.
This comprehensive approach has met with favour in our parent communities - whom I would argue are ultimately the arbiter of our actions.

Legislation aside, there is an important conversation to be had between educators and IT professionals. I blogged this issue recently - Technician with (not against) Teacher. If the IT administrator has come from the corporate sector, then he/she will want and need to understand the “business of learning”. Let the conversation begin.