I work with kids in a number of schools around New Zealand, and as part of my work, I send them links. If they can’t open the links, it’s usually because of a school internet filter rejecting the link on the basis of being in a broad-but-undoubtedly-nasty category. I expect “adult material” may be one of the categories, but I wouldn’t know, because I never send them links like that.
However, just in case, like me, you didn’t realise just how much of the internet was out to get you, here are some categories that you could avoid too:
- Blogs. All of them. Even ones by other schools. Really.
- Pictures. Especially Flickr, one of the easiest sites on which kids can search for Creative Commons licensed material that is clearly labelled showing the conditions under which they may legally use them.
- Search Engines. It seems schools specify a default search engine, and the filter blocks all the rest. Even CC Search, a portal to several search engines set up to help users search them for CC licensed material, is blocked at many schools.
- Humour. Notwithstanding that Finding Humour is one of the 16 Habits of Mind that are somewhat popular with teachers, we clearly can’t allow kids to read funny posts on the internet. They’ll just have to find that humour somewhere else.
- Streaming Media. Because if a picture is
worth a thousand wordsout to get you in a thousand ways, imagine the damage a really educational video could do!
I am often left wondering whether we really need to be this safe? What do you think?