This has SO been making me crazy.
Do we really believe that students in school should be seen and not heard? Do we really believe that the only means of communication students should have with the world (or their friends) is voice communication in strictly supervised situations? Do we really believe that we are doing students favors by not letting them reach the social aspects of the Internet? Do we really believe that online chat and discussion sites are pure evil?
I’m one of the guilty twitters. I’m at http://twitter.com/kathweaver (I think, I’m new to twitter). I’ve found Twirl isn’t blocked by the service the district is using.
It’s nice to be able to Twitter Alfred. He’s such a good resource. I also like being able to Twitter and update Facebook at the same time. I would never remember to do both.
However, I don’t have a super lot of time for that.
What IS super frustrating is researching programming projects. I’ve been working on a large project (see other posts), in front of my students, and seeing that half of the sites I need to read to even do the project is frustrating. I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 are blocked by our district for various reasons.
XNA projects were even worse. Over half of the XNA stuff was blocked.
Not only do my kids use the proxies that are out there, but one’s even set up his own. That fooled me even for a day or two. The worst part, is that when I find a proxy and tell the district about it, they still don’t block it.
I can however, and do block websites with Lanschool, especially at the beginning of the year, and there is no way around Lanschool. If a kid COULD find the way, between Dana and I, we’d have it blocked.
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