Over the last few weeks we’ve been into a number of schools for different reasons, and each time we’ve needed to get online and go to our website. In every case it has been blocked: the schools’ filtering systems saying this is either because it is a blog or ‘webchat’.
As you can see from looking around our site there is nothing here to concern anyone, and (we hope) much that would be useful to students, teachers and other school staff. The same is true of most of the blogs I ever visit. Here are just a few that I’ve visited recently that Netsweeper who through LGFL provide filtering for most London schools would categorise as blogs that many schools then choose to block en masse:
- Dan Lea’s (Teacher of the Year) website about creativity
- The Whiteboard Blog: Interactive Technology in the Classroom
- Wallyford Primary School’s whole website
- The Chickenman’s (Assistant Head at Saltash.net Community School) blog (and in fact anything on edublogs, of which a huge amount is of value and little to none is of any danger)
By blocking these sites not only is that valuable information lost to the people who would find it most useful, but, more importantly, an opportunity to educate students on how to use the web intelligently and safely is lost.
Rather than simply blocking these sites, the same filtering systems could be used to offer advice and tools in an overlay or sidebar.
A far better alternative would be to allow access but to provide warnings about the risk of trusting certain types of sites, information and guidance on how to work out what is trustworthy and give people the chance to report problematic sites and content:
Schools could create their own warning and guidance or use default ones provided by the same people who currently do the web filtering. This would teach safe and sensible use of the web, which young people need as they will be using it unsupervised at home , work or (increasingly) in the palm of their hand.