A Letter From a Student About Filtering

I mean, I’m in a class called Entre­pre­neur­ship. I have a busi­ness and I want to adver­tise to engaged women about my DJ ser­vices. On Face­book, I can cre­ate an ad that will only show up on the pages of women in the Syracuse/Oneida/Utica/Rome areas, who are engaged. Now nor­mally, if you ran an ad in a news­pa­per for that, the ad may only apply to every 1 out of 100 peo­ple that read it.

I think the biggest con­cerns would be, 1. Stu­dents would waste study hall time on social net­work­ing sites or game sites, and 2. Stu­dents would have access to inap­pro­pri­ate content.

Well for 1, isn’t school all about prepar­ing stu­dents for the real world? When I go out and get a job where I’m on the com­puter for hours dur­ing the day, there isn’t going to be a block­ing sys­tem. If I want to waste 20 min­utes, I will have the abil­ity to go to a game site and play the heli­copter game. Or if I want, I’ll have the abil­ity to check my Face­book. So instead of just try­ing to block it all, which is impos­si­ble, we should just teach stu­dents now to be pro­duc­tive with their time. If a stu­dent seri­ously has all their work done with 10 min­utes left in a study hall and they want to check their Face­book, who cares?!

2. I know we have the abil­ity to mon­i­tor what stu­dents are doing on the com­puter through another com­puter. Mir­ror­ing, what­ever you call it. Is that dif­fi­cult to do? Does it take a lot of time to go to each dif­fer­ent com­puter to check them?

Imag­ine this, what if a teacher could open up a pro­gram that would show all the com­puter screens that are cur­rently logged on in the school. It showed one at a time, and the teacher could press an arrow but­ton to go to the next screen.

How many stu­dents do you think are on the inter­net at once dur­ing school? Maybe 30 or 40? How long would it take to go through those screens to check that they weren’t look­ing at porn or any­thing inap­pro­pri­ate? Prob­a­bly less than 5 minutes.

Teach­ers have to mon­i­tor the halls now. And that’s a 40 minute com­mit­ment. Who says a teacher can’t go through for 4 min­utes to check that no one’s look­ing at porn?

It would prob­a­bly be sim­pler to have some­one check it through mir­ror­ing than to actu­ally make sure every teacher is watch­ing every kid on every com­puter in the building.

And if they did unblock every­thing, they could tell kids that. What you’re doing on the com­puter IS being mon­i­tored. If a kid wants to go on their face­book, they just bet­ter make sure what they’re doing on their face­book is appropriate.

Now another ques­tion, would it be pos­si­ble to insti­tute the web­site blocker for cer­tain users? For instance, if a stu­dent got in trou­ble for look­ing at inap­pro­pri­ate con­tent, would it be pos­si­ble to put the web­site blocker just on their account?

Just some ideas I had while I was think­ing about it on the way home. I’m not going to be in school much tomor­row because of the field trip, and I fig­ured I would for­get them before Thurs­day so I decided to e-mail you. Sorry if it was a long read.

It was inter­est­ing though, because it’s some­thing that I had been think­ing a lot about the last few days, and I had actu­ally thought about bring­ing in up in the Stu­dent Coun­cil meet­ing today (because we meet with Mr. [Prin­ci­pal] from time to time to express stu­dent con­cerns) but I fig­ured it would be kind of pointless.

If you ever want a stu­dents per­spec­tive or need any help with it, I would be more than willing.