Category Archives: Infrastructure

Would You Please Block?

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Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom.  I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing.  It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.

Here it is:

Thanks for your question.  When we implemented our new filter this school year, we looked at all the things we were currently blocking, what things were required to be blocked by law, and what we were blocking that we shouldn’t be.

What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool.  Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them.  Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem.  It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use.  Rather than blocking sites on an ad hoc basis, we will instead be working with folks to help them through computer and lab management issues in a way that promotes student responsibility.  We know that the best filters in a classroom or lab are the people in that lab – both the educational staff monitoring student computer use as well as the students themselves.

This opens up possibilities for students and staff using websites for instructional purposes that in the past were blocked due to broad category blocks.  It requires that staff and students manage their technology use rather than relying on a third party solution that can never do the job of replacing teachers monitoring students.

That said, we will still block sites that are discovered to violate CIPA requirements.  If you discover one, please do not hesitate to share it with us.  Also, if you discover a site that shouldn’t be blocked, please pass that along so that we can open it up.

I hope this makes sense.  I’d be happy to speak further with you if you have further comments or questions.

How do you talk to folks in your districts about your Internet (un)filtering?

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The Filter. For the Moment.

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This morning, Darren mentioned that he’s decided to block Facebook in his school district.  To his credit, he then asked:

Nonetheless, I’m as sure as you are that this is a debate far from over, and therefore maintain a stance of open inquiry into whether or not we’re doing the right thing.  So give it to me straight:

  • Would you leave Facebook open on your K-12 network?
  • If so, why?
  • And, what are you doing to train your teachers to effectively utilize it with their students?
  • Additionally, what can you do on Facebook that can’t be done elsewhere?

I think he’s asking important questions – but not the right ones for a filtering decision.  The world’s a big place.  Not everything in it has an educational purpose or goal.  Many things that don’t seem overtly “educational” actually are.  (And vice versa.) Yet – the world is the place that we working in schools are supposed to be helping students to succeed in.  So why do we keep turning off the parts of it that make us uncomfortable?  The questions of Internet filtering are often focused on the notion that we can control everything that happens to a student.  We cannot.   We must create safe environments for learning and teaching – but we should never hide behind empty promises of “safe,” promises we can never actually deliver on.

In our school district, as we made a switch from sharing ISP service with other districts to becoming our own ISP and investing in our own firewall and filtering solutions, we had to make a decision about what to filter and why.  As I’ve never been a fan of overfiltering, and I know that even the best filters make mistakes of both permissive and restrictive natures, I and some others suggested that perhaps it was time for us to rethink our filtering strategy.

Basically, we argued, let’s quit pretending that the Internet filter is something that it isn’t.  Namely, the Internet filter can and should never take the place of a responsible educator working with students to ensure they are working with the best possible resources to accomplish their educational work.  When a teacher isn’t around, we want to make sure that our students are able to move forward and not get mired down in the random world of distractions that the Internet can offer.  But we want students to be able to internalize the discipline that it takes to do that.  And our boss took that idea to our district leadership, and they agreed.  As of the start of the school year, we are blocking the categories we feel meet the requirements of law as well as a few additional categories relating to hacking and software downloads that our technical side of the house deemed risky to the network.  A very few categories (three, I believe, though I am working from memory as I write this), those dealing with particularly sensitive topics, are available only to staff and to students with staff override.  This is a big change and we’re all pretty excited about it.  Filters are like any other source of power and control – they begin to become solutions to problems that they weren’t created to solve – no matter how badly they fail to solve them.

We’re going to block very few things, beyond the legally required ones, that are distractions.  Distractions aren’t a technology problem.  They’re a people problem.  And creating artificial spaces that don’t actually help to promote the behaviors and attitudes that are important for success is maybe the biggest distraction of all.

We could argue the educational merits of Facebook.  (But it’s mostly a distraction.  Every now and then, it won’t be.  Let’s let students and staff get to it when they believe they need to and stop making it and a few other websites such big deals at school.)

We could argue the educational merits of MySpace.  (But same thing.)

We could take a random stab and try to guess what the NEXT BIG WEBSITE will be, the thing that students will want to do rather than do their school work.  (But we’ll probably guess wrong.  And the websites will almost never be the problem.  The problem is that students don’t want to do their schoolwork.  That’s a problem that deserves more attention than whether or not a profile might get updated or a playlist shared.  Heck – at least in the case of a playlist or profile, something is getting created.)

There are an awful lot of distractions on the Internet.  Every time we focus on them, we draw attention to them and away from the educational goals and objectives we’d like to, and should be, focusing on.  Let’s all stop doing that.

Our filters have prevented us from getting a great deal of work done.  Teachers spent lots of time under our old filter trying to route around it to share important information with students.  Students spent countless hours trying to route around the filter.  (And succeeding.)  I’d've rather they’d each have been able to do the thing they wanted to do and then go on with their days.

And now they can. Mostly.  It’s not a perfect solution.  There are still glitches and overblocks – but we are working to unblock things that come up blocked for a teacher as quickly as we are alerted to the errors.  As we see use of resources increase, we may have to do some traffic shaping – which might be a better alternative to blocking outright, or it might create an entirely new set of problems.  We’ll see.

Darren is right about one thing – this is a new idea, the idea that the Internet’s there and (mostly) available.  And there’s plenty of teaching and learning to do about how to avoid distractions, and how to make sure that we are expecting the best of our students and staff.  But let’s not get stuck in command and control positions of assumption that lead us to discredit the experiences and expertise of the adults in the classrooms with our students every day.  Let’s believe in them rather than worry for them.

People will rise to the expectations that are set for them, and in our district, I am proud to say that we are beginning to expect big things from staff and students regarding their Internet use.  There’s lots and lots of work ahead, but I feel very good about the fact that we have finally started framing the problems of Internet misuse as problems of behavior and not of technology.  I hope other school districts can do the same.  And I hope that my district can hold true to its vision.  I have high expectations for us, too.

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Not “New,” “Good”

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Will writes this week about some thinking inspired by a tweet from John Pederson:

So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.’” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is.

The thing about trying to argue that network/community building should be the goal of 21st Century professional development  is that there’s an assumption in that argument that community building as a piece of professional development is a new way of doing things, that that building community is a 21st Century idea.  And, perhaps with the technology, there are some “new” things there – but there might also be some “good” things there that are done in new ways. (I don’t think that John and Will make that assumption, for what it’s worth.)

“New” and “good” are not synonymous.  Neither are “new” and “bad” or “old” and “bad.”  Or “old” and “good.” Plenty of new things are bad, plenty of old things are good and so on.  I would like it very much if people working on teaching and learning projects, people studying and thinking about and implementing tools and practices, would separate the age of something from its value and attempt to make decisions based on that thing or idea or tool or practice’s value, rather than its age.

I understand why the “21st Century” whatever label gets put onto things.  It’s sexy.  It sizzles.  It’s “new” and shiny.  And yet – good professional development has always been about community building.  Professional organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries were about community and conversation and collaboration. And they and we should be in the 21st Century, too.

Yes, we are in community when we blog and tweet and share and read and write and learn together.  This is how I learn and sometimes how I teach.  Of course the technology changes (some of) the nature and the speed of those interactions.  The power of collaborative technologies is certainly “new” and, often, “good.” (Not always, though.  Plenty of “bad.”) But the networking itself, social or professional or otherwise, isn’t the new bit.  It’s the good bit.  Rich.  Rewarding.  Powerful.  Sustaining.  Rooted in professional conversation. Really, really good.

But not new.

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The Podcast: Karl Follows Up on “Worth Keeping”

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In this podcast, recorded last week, Karl and I continue the conversation that began in the comments to my last podcast.  I hope that he and I can keep talking like this from time to time, and that the recording of our conversation is useful to you.  And I hope you continue the conversation, too.

Link to Audio

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The Podcast: Worth Keeping

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Today’s podcast is a continuation of some thinking that came out of a roundtable conversation that I had at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.  Karl reminds me that I’ve been forgetting to share here on the blog lately.  I’ll try to do better.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.

Link to the Audio

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It’s Not Glamo(u)rous. Just Essential.

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I had the opportunity on Friday to spend some time with our enterprise systems manager thinking about something that certainly isn’t glamo(u)rous, but is nothing shy of essential.  That something?

Storage.

Sure, there’s plenty of “free” storage out there for the taking, but I’m interested in making sure that we can offer students and staff in our district a reliable environment that will be there today and tomorrow, and won’t disappear, or fill up, in the middle of the night.  As we see more and more growth of our district’s Virtual Campus (a Moodle installation), as well as the beginnings of the use of in-district blogging tools, we’ve got to make sure that we’re planning for enough space so that we can meet the needs of teachers and students both today and down the road.

That sounds easy – but it’s certainly not.  Hence our conversation.  I actually find fascinating all the bits and pieces of infrastructure that go into making sure that, when you turn on your computer or launch a browser, the stuff that you want is there for your use.  And I know, too, that the infrastructure that we build ultimately affects what can and cannot be done with students, so there’s a direct impact on education with every technology decision made.  I take opportunities to think and learn about the district’s infrastructure very seriously.

And now, I need your help.  I’m wondering, and have been asked to make a guess (well more like an attempt at making a semi-intelligent shot in the dark) about what the storage needs of a teacher and a student are today here in the dawn of the 21st Century.  How much space does a teacher need to teach and a student to learn and to archive his or her learning over the life of public schooling?  What’s a decent ballpark?  How much space should we have available just for the digital learning and online storage needs of a district of approximately 25,000 students and 1300 teachers?  Can you defend your answer?

We’re going to be making some plans around these numbers, and we’d like to at least get close.   Any ideas you have are much appreciated.

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