Effects of Site Blocking on Teaching & Learning
This is actually #3 in the Site Blocking posts. Catch up on earlier posts here.
Question 9 of the survey asked respondents to identify possible effects of site blocking on teaching and learning.
The responses to the survey about site blocking have revealed a high level of frustration among educators.
It is clear that getting a blocked site unblocked is sometimes a tedious process and certainly time consuming, and may result in refusal.
In those cases the teacher feels their professional judgement is being questioned.
There are some side effects on teacher preparation, related to the difficulty in telling whether a site available for staff either at school or at home will be blocked for students at school.
I no longer can be bothered working at home and do all my school work at school instead.
“anywhere, anytime learning” can be a bit of a joke. Often you need to know sites well in advance and arrange for a review request.
It can be frustrating when you have researched and put together a lesson at home only to find it is not accessible at school
It has slowed things down and makes it hard to be inventive or new
frustrating for some staff to be always cap in hand to the ed admin person.
most teachers just work around the blocking by using some other site which is unblocked, as in a busy teacher’s life it’s just not worth the hassle of getting something unblocked.
requires prechecking by staff
all the prep done at home goes out the window in the classroom.
Teachers are reporting that they do not attempt to do any professional learning at work, because so many web 2.0 tools like delicious are blocked
Teachers are reporting two major effects on student learning
Students often give up on doing research tasks at school after becoming frustrated by constant unavailability of information.
The students need to learn to do their own censoring, and being told they are going to a bad site when they aren’t is merely confusing.
7 Comments
I haven’t written a blog post in nearly a year. Kerrie, this series of articles stirs up some issues and so I find myself here biting at this bait. It was interesting to revisit my thoughts from more than two years ago http://waraku.blogspot.com/2007/04/internet-filtering-system-broken.html where I stated that we had a filtering system that was based on mistrust and essentially is broken. Recently it became possible for individual teachers to override the filters. Looking back on my post not much else has changed or improved. It is still broken. I feel the stirrings of reentering the fracas. Just as the new SACE grows some balls with the Research Project, brought about by the ICT led information revolution, the internet filter threatens its success by blocking access to the stuff that will make it tick.
Hi Kerrie, I too feel very frustrated in my role as an ICT teacher in a Primary School. I have 3 Kinder, and some Year 1, 2 & 3 classes. I work part-time and prepare all my lessons from home. Given that I am not the main ICT teacher at the school I don’t have all the access and permissions nor System Maintenance knowledge to work around any problems that I encounter due to blocking, speed of the network etc. This has a huge impact (often negative) on the delivery of my lessons and therefore the learning experience for the students. Does this mean we need to have a chalk and talk lesson prepared for each lesson just in case the technology and system lets us down? …Prue
You make some valid points however instead of throwing up your hands and giving up, we need to convince the powers that be of the value of 2.0 tools such as de.lic.ious, diigo, ning etc. Taking control of professional learning means exactly that taking control of our learning and the environment that we learn in.
Hi Kerrie
I have just read with interest Peter Simmonds defence of blocking http://learningspaces09.ning.com/forum/topics/filtering-blocking-censoring and find that there are a few issues that arise from it. To compare web filtering to a Librarians desk is applying 20th Century thinking to a 21st Century problem. Much like setting up a mechanics workshop on the principles of a horse stable! The rationale about protecting the reckless, the naïve and the innocent reminds me of past practices of protectionism, missionaries and hopefully defunct political movements. A friend has compared the internet to entering a giant newsagency. Every kid knows the location of the comics as well as the porno. We all know the consequences for our choices. Just as the newsagency has its surveillance camera we should have effective software surveillance systems on our network. Ours costs us about $330 and is excellent. Censorship in education is a dangerous prospect and the current process is much like putting the finger in an ever expanding crack. We need an extensive discussion on this. I am happy to participate in it.
It’s just as bad from the other side of the filter. We have a parent interview booking service (www.schoolinterviews.com.au) that 200 schools think is the bee’s knees - but Education Queensland have blocked us. They decided we encourage schools to upload student data outside their firewall, without any communication with us. We’ve now explained that schools upload only teacher’s names and the subjects they teach, and hopefully they’ll change their minds eventually.
So a valuable service for schools is lumped in with terrorists and pornographers - by adding control of uploaded data to their remit, they are effectively preventing Queensland’s schools from access to ANY web-based services. I’d contend that is a serious handicap to school staff and students.
One last point - if they make the filter too restrictive, schools will find ways to bypass it. Already we have had a couple of Queensland schools access us (via a laptop with a mobile data modem in one case), and it turns out our New Zealand site isn’t blocked (if you’re from Queeensland try www.schoolinterviews.co.nz - but don’t tell EQ!). If school have to do this too often, it will become the norm, and they lose all the protection a properly managed filter should provide.
While I agree with everyone’s comments so far - everything about the speed of EQ’s internet provision is a problem! We are encouraged on the one hand to use Learning Place, but when it takes some kids an hour to access it, they are certainly not learning anything productive! The blocking is frustrating and again we are not helping the kids learn to be selective about the information they access when it is all so automatically blocked. HOWEVER … what are we all doing about it? Should the Union actually step in and intervene on our behalf because individual complaints sure aren’t changing attitudes.
Belinda, The slowness could in fact be partially or largely a direct consequence of the filtering. As all page requests have to go through the filtering process, speed can be significantly degraded depending up the usual things like speed of machine and number of requests.
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