So...What Happened?

backstory in a nutshell: we started the school year with more internet blocking than ever, thanks to a new non-school internet blocker that blocked everything by category, so we had no access to news, media, music, radio, etc.

we finally had a meeting at the end of week 3, with our headmaster and all the people concerned about the problems with access at school, which totaled about 12(on a side note, i have spent 2 days now helping a senior master get his laptop working at home!)

our headmaster is so good; he is serious about our needing to be part of the 21st century and not the end of the 19th. he asked everyone what we cannot get to that we need (HUGE list!), and what we thought we should do about our current lack of access (at least go back to last year's settings). he also asked if students could be hurt by unlimited internet access, which, of course, is yes. the internet, like everything else in life, needs to be taken with moderation and a grain of salt, and exposure to porn, whether wittingly or not, is abusive.

the net result is that we have our access back, mostly. there are selected sites blocked, such as trademe and facebook and bebo. while i would prefer total access (trademe's message board is a great way to reach a wide variety of people to fill in student surveys on surveymonkey; students' own facebook or bebo blogs would be convenient for blogging, as well as teaching them that their online profiles affect their lives in more ways than the obvious), i can live with it. we are also installing a programme (forget name) on teachers' computers so we can see what are students are working on; essential when you can't be everywhere at once.

my question at the end of the day is: if watchdog, the school internet blocking tool provided by the ministry of education, is doing *its* job, why is it our individual school's responsibility to do more than the ministry by using a second blocker that blocks everything else via tags/categories? and why does the it tech have say about what teachers teach? what do you think?

Network Blocking ARGH!

so, i've been so darn angry the last two weeks that i haven't bothered to write about it, hoping the situation would resolve itself. well, it's not going to resolve itself, and i just have to vent before making an appointment to speak with the headmaster.

last year i attended Ulearn08 with our headmaster and some other folks from my school. the net result was that this year we were going to have open internet access, among other cool stuff. well...

i came to school after our (too short) summer holiday and plugged in the network, used google chrome for various things, then went home. when i plugged my computer into my own modem, i couldn't load chrome, as "your network administrator has blocked your access to proxies. see him" (that's a paraphrase) came up. thinking it must be the browser i used, i tried internet explorer, only to find that the connections tab was missing altogether! i rang our NA at home, and he, wisely, neither answered nor returned my call. i was absolutely livid.

the next day i went straight to him, and was told that it was "possible" for a student with a laptop to access our proxy and use up our internet time. he added, "the ministry provides laptops for work, at work". he then tempered that with the info that he had only changed the proxy access on IE, and that chrome "must be borrowing the settings from IE, tell it to change them properly; then, d/l firefox, which should work fine for you at home".

so, downloaded firefox, which does work fine at home, BUT...

EVERYTHING is blocked! first, we couldn't access any video sites, then radio sites, now sites on metaphors, and today i couldn't even open my payslip in google docs! it's gotten so ridiculous i would be speechless if i just weren't so angry!

>>Site blocked. www.nbc.com is not allowed on this network.
>>This site was categorized as:
>>Television
>>Questions? Not properly categorized?

look, i get that school doesn't want staff hanging around on tradme, but come on! half of the english curriculum in nz is media studies! without access to media, how am i to teach my classes? and not using my laptop at home? where do they think i actually do MY work, after teaching all day?

and the idea that a student will use up all our allowance? c'mon! i've only ever seen 1 student here with a laptop, and he was a top boy! seriously, what is the percentage?

oh, and then to add insult to injury, on thursday all staff received an article in our inboxes, from the _principals' digests_, entitled "using the potential of facebook, youtube, and myspace" (none of which we can access, of course)! it carried the reports of a study, which i'm sure you've seen by now, with a vision of student today, and recommended: consideration of social networking sites for staff as well as classrooms, harnessing the educational value of chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, and wikis, "ensur[ing] equitable access", and so on. was that supposed to be a joke? were they kidding? are they laughing in their offices about how frustrated we are?

the new nz curriculum calls for teaching students how to live in their future, utilising technology students use in their everyday lives. how can we do that if we, the teachers, do not have access? while i had planned a variety of exciting units for this year, at all different levels, i am seriously thinking of bagging all of them and simply using "chalk and talk". running into gigantic problems every time i want to do something new and relevant is becoming too big an obstacle. i am very close to giving up.

Getting the Techonology We Need

so, i 've just come from a meeting with our headmaster about availability of technology.  i've written this before: our school blocks heaps of useful websites (bbc radio?!) and student computers have java blocked, which means, of course, that many many activities are simply not do-able.   for example, i recently designed a level 1 research unit (year 11) on careers that included a surveymonkey online survey as well as future course planning using successmaker at kiwiquals. students could do neither of these things. the survey we had to forgo altogether, and the course planning had to be done via pen and paper (and yet more photocopying.  sorry trees).

our headmaster is more than amenable to making changes, including students logging on to computers under their own log in rather than an anonymous "research" one, which involves having to save any online research to a shared folder, log off, log in again with a personal log in, then drag files out of shared into personal folder. if it hasn't been deleted by some knob in another lab somewhere on campus. which it often has, since they can do stupid things anonymously. however, we are now going to have a larger meeting with several staff, and i know that some of the long term male members will be reluctant (to put it nicely) to make the changes. i know, change IS scary. but it CAN be managed.

please, if your school offers free internet access and/or your students have java enabled on their computers, leave a comment below. any positive feedback would be very helpful. or, conversely, positive stories of dealing with the naughties would be helpful too!.

have a great weekend :O)