Taste of Tech

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Fifty-eight people registered for my blog yesterday. You don’t have to register to read the blog, but you do have to have an account in order to post comments. Mostly, I do that to keep people from anonymously posting inappropriate material. It also helps to keep the comment spam to a minimum.

Considering that I haven’t had 58 people register for my blog ever, yesterday’s activity came as a bit of a surprise. At first, I thought there was some bot out there on the ‘net creating all of these accounts in order to start a spam attack. After a few minutes, though, I noticed a pattern. These are all students. A quick check confirmed my suspicions. They’re all seventh graders, and they’re all in Mrs. Hubert’s computer class. She’s starting off the year teaching them about blogs. Good for her.

So now, we have all of these students with registered accounts. So they can all comment here, if they have something to say. What if I ask a question? Will they respond? Let’s try:

It’s very easy to find things online now. A quick Google search will turn up a wealth of information on just about any topic. Because it’s easy to post information online, though, we can’t always be sure that the things we’re reading online are accurate, complete, balanced, or reliable. As a member of this plugged-in, digital generation, what strategies do you use to determine whether something you read online is reliable information?

If you’re in Mrs. Hubert’s class, feel free to jump in with a comment. Just remember that anyone can read what you write. If you’re not in Mrs. Hubert’s class, you can chime in, too.

It’s getting harder and harder to use the web in schools, and we’re getitng close to a breaking point.

Friday afternoon, a teacher came in to my office. “Who do I need to yell at? The principal? Will that work? Should I call the superintendent?”

She’s generally pretty easy-going, and it took a little while to figure out what she was talking about. It turns out there’s a web site with a video that she wanted to show on the first day of school. But the site was blocked by the Internet filter. She tried several different versions of the same kind of video, on several different sites. They were all blocked. She used the same resources last year, and didn’t have trouble accessing them then. The filters have evolved (or maybe devolved).

In reality, the video she wanted is hosted on Google Video. That whole site is blocked by the Internet filter. We have a review procedure in place where teachers can request that specific web pages be blocked or unblocked. Unfortunately, on most of the video sharing sites, it’s nearly impossible to unblock one video while continuing to block the rest of the site. We tried to do that with YouTube last year, and gave up after several attempts.

For this teacher, and many others like her, technology use is becoming an increasingly frustrating activity. Why bother to find online resources if those resources are just going to get blocked by the filter?

The web is becoming more and more interactive. Users have more control over content. We can post comments on web pages. We can upload videos and audio files and pictures. It really is easier to interact online now than ever before. But that also means there’s less control over the sites online. It’s increasingly possible to accidentally encounter inappropriate materials on the web. And charged with the task of “protecting” our children, the filters end up blocking nearly everything that’s useful or interesting.

I can sense that this is all going to come to a head this year. This teacher wasn’t trying to download dirty pictures. She wasn’t trying to find out how to make meth in her basement. She wasn’t trying to play a first-person shooter at school. She was trying to do her job. And I had to keep her from doing that because that’s my job.

I don’ t know what the solution is. We’re definitely going to need to look at current policy, and re-examine it in the context of our community’s expectations, the law, and the changing nature of the Internet. But it may be possible to loosen the reins a bit. We may also be able to change our network configuration (not a small task) to allow different levels of filtering in different locations. One of the problems we currently struggle with is the fact that everyone has the same filter. So the K-3 buildings have the same rules as the high school. That doesn’t serve either group very well. I don’t have any answers yet, but I think it’s important to keep asking the questions.

In the meantime, there are a couple things we can do. In the past, we have circumvented filtering problems by hosting a lot of things locally. Since our web server isn’t blocked by the filter, we can put things on it that would be blocked if they were elsewhere. For example, we host a number of blogs on our web server. If we used an external site, that site would be blocked. But because it’s a school web site, it’s not. We wanted to use del.icio.us, but it’s blocked by the filter. So we installed Scuttle locally and used that instead. While this isn’t a scalable solution by any means, it has helped us put off the debate for a while.

All staff members have the ability to request a review of a web site if they disagree with the filtering decision for that site. This process is imperfect. As I mentioned, there are some cases where it’s not practical to unblock access to specific resources. It’s also not immediate. But does work pretty well, and I’ve been pleased with the decisions made by the review team.

Products like YouTube and Google Video are frustrating. Because you can easily embed videos from these sites into other blogs or web pages, a lot of really good resources end up being blocked. That video the teacher was trying to access looked like it was on a science web site. But since it was actually an embedded Google Video, the filter’s rule against Google Video blocked it. If you have access to a computer without the filter, you can sometimes extract these videos and save them for use in the classroom. Several of the state technology coordinators have recommended Zamzar for extracting embedded flash movies from web sites. Just paste in the YouTube or Google Video web site address, and it will extract the video and convert it to a format you can use on your computer. Predictably, Zamzar is itself blocked by our web filter. But for those who use the web outside of school, it’s an easy way to extract videos for classroom use.

It’s certainly not a solution. But it’s a start.

The Cleveland Public Schools started school last week. New this year are four new single-gender schools: two for girls, and two for boys. All four schools serve grades K-2. The district is promoting the new schools as a way to “help students build confidence, try new things and develop a sense of belonging. ”

WKSU’s Kevin Niedermier reported on the new schools on Thursday. They’re tailoring the curriculum to the boys. Boys don’t like to sing, so they’re adapting the way they’re teaching music. Girls don’t particpate as much in physical education, so that subject is being tailored to meet their needs. By focusing on the needs of only one gender, the schools hope to provide a better, more suited environment for them.

This scares me.

Girls think math is hard, so we’ll dumb it down for them. They don’t need as much science as the boys do, either. Girls should study more poetry, and take home economics. Typing. They definitely need typing. They’ll really impress the boss with their efficiency someday.

The boys need to know how to be leaders, to make decisions, to compete. They have to understand politics. Physics, calculus. Those are important too. They probably don’t need so much training in arts and culture.

It’s amazing to me that we’re heading in this direction, after resolving essentially the same issue more than forty years ago. The last twenty years have seen a move toward inclusive education, where students are not separated based on learning ability. It’s amazing to me that we would separate boys and girls because they learn better separately, and yet keep a kid with an IQ of 80 and another kid with an IQ of 120 in the same classroom because they learn better in a heterogeneous environment with their peers.