Filtering: An expert voices my concerns
Jan 3rd, 2010 by Cathy Jo Nelson
Recently I’ve stirred up a conversation regarding filters here (yet again.) Look what Ann Oro, a friend from my PLN dropped in my lap tonight!
Ann Oro (aka njtechteacher) is referring her friends and PLN members to Nancy Willard’s recent post regarding filters in schools today, and Nancy is right on the money! (Thanks Ann!!) Be sure to read the whole article, but here area few of my favorite quotes:
- If teachers and students are constantly frustrated that they can never count on being able to access the material that is relevant for instruction, they are not going to even try to use the Internet for instruction.
- So why don’t we start treating teachers like professionals (radical thought, eh?) and give all instructional staff the authority to bypass the filter – on their own discretion – to access sites for instructional purposes….
- Yes, some teachers will not be responsible. Some may not understand other concerns, like bandwidth. But districts can come up with clear standards for when using the bypass authority is appropriate, bandwidth “hogs” are pretty easy to detect, and bypasses are recorded so a periodic random review ought to be effective in identifying teachers who are misusing this authority.
Just in case you did not know, Nancy Willard, MS., J.D, is the Director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. She has a background in work with at risk youth and law and has focused on issues of youth risk online and effective Internet use management in schools for over 12 years.
Unfortunately, there are many teachers would either abuse this power or neglect it. The abusers would be the smallest minority but those who neglect the power would be the more dangerous minority. They would allow students to access their computers without thinking of what the students could do. This is where some trouble the Gatekeepers worry about would happen. Student access a site parents don’t want their child to see. Student says they accessed it at school on the teacher’s computer. Parent calls either the district office or school board. They call IT about the problem instead of the offending teacher. IT will just shut everything down so they won’t get those calls again. We are back to square one. Seen it happen too many times.
Cathy,
Thanks for sharing this resource…Nancy’s a very credible source, and I agree with her point.
What if we treat teachers like professionals with common sense!
[...] had many posts before about filtering (here’s one, another, and another.) I plan to use some of them as I formulate my response. My favorites are posts [...]