Filters and Blocks - Need Your Input!
April 1, 2008 by Kate Olson
Can you tell I’m in love with Google forms?
I’m collecting data on the range of sites blocked at schools for educators and I would greatly appreciate it if you could take a minute or two and fill out my survey (seriously, REALLY easy and fast!). All you need to do is click on the link below.
Please include any sites or applications that you are unable to access at school for either student use or professional development use (Classroom 2.0, other nings, twitter, gmail, etc). Please add as many as apply to you. I really hope this will help shed some light on the broad range of educational resources unavailable to teachers in many K-12 institutions today.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this - I will publish the results here and in a public Google Spreadsheet after it seems as if results have stopped coming in. Any input on suggestions for the survey would be appreciated as well, just throw it in a comment here!
Additional Related Reading
Letter to the NYS Board of Regents - Diane Cordell (added at 2:00 pm 4/1/08)
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I didn’t think it appropriate in adding this to your form as it could convolute your data but this issue is prevelant across Further and Higher Education within the UK. The institution I’m based at blocks Skype although I know they are secretly testing it due to pressure from senior managers. I know of other institutions that have completely blocked YouTube becasue a few disruptive students have posted defamatory content.
One thing that annoys me is when institutions simply run away from a problem by blocking things. Emphasis should be put onto educating staff about the issues and perhaps training. Hell, why not even open the discussion up at an early stage using a Wiki or something which could help to develop policy and strategy around external tools.
Are you posting the results here or Classroom 2.0?
Cheers
Andy
Too many sites to list … but generally, can’t get into wikis (even the one I put together for teachers), can’t get into blogs (even the ones I wanted to show as examples to teachers) and so on. Funny thing is, I could get into some blogs at school and not others (even though they were under the same umbrella).
I would love to take the survey but you guessed it…the site is blocked at school. I will try at home.