As you are aware, the district is required to provide a filtered Internet experience. By federal law, we must filter access. However, the law has different scopes. For example, the filtering that we must do for students is different than the filtering that must be done for staff.
To that end, we have been working on providing appropriate access to all of our personnel. This is a much larger task than it sounds, but something that we have been working diligently on. We had previously opened up access to teachers to YouTube. We have continued to work on our filters and settings so that teachers have much wider access to the internet. I’m happy to report that we have made some substantial changes that allow teachers access to appropriate sites.
One of the challenges that we face is to communicate to teachers sites that are available to them, but blocked for students. Essentially, we don’t want teachers to create lesson plans that revolve around students accessing particular sites only to discover that those sites are blocked for students (but not teachers). This is why you may have to authenticate to get to some sites. Then we face another issue. Teachers don’t want to authenticate constantly. So we need some balance. For this reason, once a teacher authenticates, that starts a clock whereas the teacher won’t have to authenticate for a bit.
We are working extremely hard to provide the very best experience for staff and students. We do block a wide variety of sites that are inappropriate for the educational process. We are required to do so by federal law. It is also just the right thing to do.
Please note that we rely on algorithms for web site filtering. Occasionally, I get asked
“How could you block….”?
or
“How did you let …. get through for …. grade”?
We really don’t spend all day just looking at web sites to see if they are appropriate or not. We rely on complex rules and algorithms to make determinations. We then intervene as necessary.
*By the way, the same issues revolve around SPAM. Yes, occasionally a piece of SPAM does make it through our filter. However, we don’t read each piece of email prior to you receiving it. We eliminate literally thousands of SPAM emails for every single one that does make it through.