I was talking to a collegue from my school, which I’m on leave from at the moment, yesterday about how the school now has very heavy restrictions on what can be accessed by kids over the internet. This is an Education Department run site-blocking system that is now in place in most state schools in Western Australia. When my colleague asked the on-site network administrator about unblocking some sites he was simply told “there’s nothing I can do about it”. The blocking notice page does have a request form for a block to be removed for a particular site, but when I asked my colleague about using that he said that he had tried on several occassions but that no action seemed to have been taken on his requests. Probably just disappeared into some administrative black hole.

Another school in the area has reportedly gone as far as blocking students from downloading any types of media files. As a teacher of multimedia subjects, hearing this sort of thing just frustrates the hell out of me. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have some filtering but it now seems to have reached a level that is blocking legitimate educational use by students.

Considering, in my opinion, that as a school system we are still very behind in the implementation of ICT, this sort of blanket action over internet content will only serve to obstruct teachers and discourage the use of ICT in the classroom. Again it seems to have come down to the blame denominator. The system doesn’t want to have the finger pointed at it if a student does access something controversial or inappropriate. How about we actually have the opportunity to teach them to be discerning users of this technology? And also take some responsibility as teachers to monitor what our students are doing in class. It’s really no different than when a student snuck a Playboy magazine into class 20 years ago, the teacher needs to be aware of what’s going on in the classroom, not have each kid frisked and bag checked at the school gate.