Tag Archives: Filtering

A Progressive Approach To The Internet In School

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A post I’ve been meaning to write for many months…

Battles:

I have had my battles with Internet filtering in the past, but I’m now the man in charge.  Every school I have worked in so far in my opinion has had an old fashioned ‘head in the sand’ view to filtering and acceptable use of the Internet within school.  I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Reversing a Head In The Sand mentality. CC licensed image from David Barrie at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/addictive_picasso/

Battleground:

I would estimate that 95% of our pupils now own a mobile phone, and that 80% of these have unrestricted access to the Internet on these devices.  This doesn’t factor in devices such as netbooks, iPod Touches and PSPs that are also brought into school.  What this leads to is unrestricted, unfiltered access to the Internet within our school, and at a pace and quality that is ever increasing.  I also regularly receive requests from teachers to block this that and the other as a classroom management tool.

Battle plan:

I strongly believe that in response to this situation we need a new approach to Internet access within schools, something that still protects our children but also that prepares them for the World in which they live.

This comes in 3 parts:

  1. An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that is relevant, understood by all parties and linked closely to general school behaviour policies.
  2. Relatively unfiltered Internet access.
  3. Quality monitoring solutions.

Continue reading →

Influencing Policy Part 2: Becta-X: Old Conversations, New Connections, Bright Future?

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I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break.  The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector.  Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.

The aims of the day were:

The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds

We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.

I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:

Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh

As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was.  My 2-cents worth: Continue reading →

The Fight Goes On

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Many thanks to all those who commented on my rant last month with regards to Internet filtering etc within school, I know it’s something a lot of us come up against each and every day.

I thought I’d quickly update those who were interested on my progress.  I put together a list of exemplars of Teaching & Learning via the Web and passed these on to my Head.  He sees them as a persuasive argument and is keen to set up a whole-school debate on the issue.  I couldn’t ask for more than that, so fingers crossed that I can continue the persuasion at the next stage.

The quick examples I used were:

  • Youtube: As a random example, searching ‘Sequences Math’ returns over 300 videos.  There are great education videos available for free, particularly useful for spontaneous class discussion moments.
  • Google Docs: Allows multiple users (teachers & pupils) to edit the same text document / spreadsheet / presentation at the same time.  Would be great for collaboration / communication / AfL skills.  I’ve set up an AfL spreadsheet to share with pupils which I think will be powerful.  Could be used in Science/Maths for collecting data from experiments.  Could be used in Humanities for collaborative writing.  Tom Barret (a Primary teacher from Nottingham has been doing exemplary work on this) see here and here – his blog is full of stunning online work.
  • Flickr: Amazing collection of images and photography that could brighten any lesson.  Blocked for staff, some inappropriate images but only if you create and account, sign in and turn off safe-search.
  • Pupil blogs: Graham Wegner from Australia has some excellent examples of students blogging for all the World to see and engaging in conversations with people from around the globe.
  • Web 2.0 Storytelling: There are some great examples of telling stories using the Web.  One is the 5 Card Flickr game using the above website’s images as inspiration for a story.
Image courtesy of etrusia_uk on flickr

Help! – A plea to bring sanity to my attempts to use the Web at school

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As I have just ranted about on Tom Barrett’s blog post about using Google Docs for online reporting to parents, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to use the Internet both myself and with pupils at school.  It is to all intents and purposes blocked and Web 2.0 seems to be considered a security risk.

As an example, I arrived in school today to find that Google Docs is blocked for staff.  When pushed the risk  was explained that private pupil data could be copied onto GDocs and shared.  I was offered the opportunity to have the specific url of my spreadsheet unblocked after it had been vetted. This logic seems to wipe out the use of the entire read/write web in my school ( Here is the sheet I am trying to share with my class, I think it’s use is fairly self explanatory: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pi_Ik07yjYQaT9yf5YdsIPQ

I can feel creativity and spontanaiety along with a wealth of learning opportunities being lost at every turn.

The school is investing in a VLE, something I am losing interest in as it will be a walled garden / fortress if everything else is to go by.

I would like to present an informed argument against this to those in power over these matters at school.  The obvious starting places seem to be BECTAs recent encouragement of Web 2.0 use in schools (also see Ewan’s take), and their guidance on safe use of data.  I believe that the former encourages what I am trying to achieve and the latter does not preclude it.

I suppose my plea at the end of this rather self-indulgent rant is for any other resources I could use to help my cause, further guidance, exemplary examples of pupil/staff on-line work etc etc.

Any advice is gratefully received!

EDIT: Just to make clear and reiterate: I don’t want to get into a moan about specific staff on a public blog, I do have a good working relationship with the IT department and senior leadership, I just need to change their ways!