Nebraska Change Agent
' I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could tolerated anything so primitive.' John W Gardner
Progress Tracker
-
What Teachers Want
As more and more teachers start integrating technology into their lessons we are going to see more and more power struggles happening between teachers and techs. It seems like the struggle between teachers and techs is happening all over the world. Why is this?
In the United States it is my understanding that federal law (CIPA) requires filtering of pornography and pornography ONLY! I read with much interest a post written by Wesley Fryer about two weeks ago where he wrote about what schools were required to block. Here is the quote from that post that caught my attention:
“Just as educator misconceptions have led to widespread, overly conservative interpretations of fair use provisions of U.S. intellectual property law (a situation being addressed by a forthcoming report due on November 11, 2008 from the Media Education Lab at Temple University under the leadership of Dr. Renee Hobbs) I think we have some cases of conservative misinterpretations of the FRCP by school district administrators and IT staff members when it comes to web 2.0 sites and technologies.”
How many teachers have found themselves in a struggle with district IT’s because they want a site unblocked? I would guess that most teachers have good reasons for requesting that specific sites be unblocked. All teachers want it to be able to teach what they are asked to teach using resources of their choice. When techs decide not to unblock a site they are, in essence, directing the curriculum.
I just want an expert in school law to answer some very basic questions for me:
- It is a violation of CIPA for students to use web based mail (Yahoo, Gmail, etc) at school?
- Do schools who use Fire Fox risk losing eRate funding?
- Why are high school students restricted from searching for “images” if there is a legitimate educational purpose for the search?
I am in a district where the word “conservative” does not even begin to describe the philosophy of the IT department. The situation is improving, but we still have a very long way to go. I am schedule to present about Twitter and Nings this Friday. Twitter and the Ning I created are still blocked at the main building.
Who should decide what gets unblocked? In my opinion it needs to be a shared decision between the tech, teacher, and administrator. However, an administrator should have the final word in the matter.
Thoughts?????
4 Responses to “What Teachers Want”
Leave a Reply
-
Recent Visitors
October 13th, 2008 at 4:49 p
Hi Beth,
I am contacting you through your blog because, guess what, the Nebraska teacher’s ning is blocked at my school, although I have access from home. I would be very interested in working with your colleague, if she would like to look at some of my work at http://brittgow.globalteacher.org.au
There are links to some of the science and maths Voicethreads that I have done with students, as well as a great paper airoplane practical, using the scientific method and sharing data of flight distance.
I look forward to hearing from her!
regards, Britt Gow
[Reply]
October 13th, 2008 at 6:55 p
I know one component of eRate is the control of student email, so that may be part of the email issue. I’m not sure about the others.
My personal feeling is that the excessive blocking is initiated from a fear of being “that school” that makes the news for all the wrong reasons. I don’t feel that many IT departments feel comfortable or confident enough to approach the curriculum department about working together on the filter. A quick solution for the IT department, or the administrators who “govern” them, is to block more than what’s necessary instead of training teachers, media specialists and/or counselors on how to incorporate internet safety into their curriculum. I think we’ve gotten to a point now with cell phones that the Internet really isn’t the main form of communication at school anyway. See Kearney Public for how well it works to block them (not a good idea).
[Reply]
October 14th, 2008 at 11:18 p
Hi Beth…
Well, I guess we could be progressive in that Ning and Twitter are not blocked here….yet. However, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube….the list goes on. I can understand about MySpace. Facebook does have some worth and I even got an invite from our building tech but I can’t access it HERE! YouTube does have value for students with projects etc. However, this would require more “policing” while in the computer lab by the teacher and many teachers just do not want to deal with that (does NOT include me).
I think that it is quite difficult, and will remain so, to use Web 2.0 tools with the students as long as the tools are blocked. It’s a Catch 22 in many areas. Unfortunate!
[Reply]
December 8th, 2008 at 5:31 p
Try putting yourself in the shoes of the IT people for once. If a student accesses inappropriate material on school computers, who do you think will get the blame? It won’t be the teacher who doesn’t have the ability to monitor the students every move. It will be the IT department. Also, these sites aren’t blocked just because of content; they are also blocked to keep people on track. Many faculty members at my school district, including principals, waste a lot of time surfing the internet. As far as I’m concerned, if there is any chance that an inappropriate image could be seen by my little girls at school, then I want that site blocked. PERIOD! I’m certain that many parents would agree.
[Reply]