It’s true that requests can be made for sites to be unblocked and these requests are usually dealt with very quickly. However, if a teacher prepares work at home in the evenings it then requires a ‘double check’ runthrough in school to check that all’s OK – most teachers just don’t feel they have time for this. If all doesn’t work out well then there’s a tendency for them just to give up through frustration – that’s what many of them tell me anyway. Suddenly experiencing such a high level of filtering has certainly frustrated me.

Hi AB.

East Lothian just went through an automatic server update. It ended up blocking all typepad and blogspot.com sites. Even Ollie Bray’s site was blocked LOL!

However I spoke nicely to IT who were very understanding and relaxed the firewall for those demains.

Hi Andrew

Great to meet up with you yesterday.

Dundee also uses Websense. Websense classes everything not on its white list or black list as uncategorised and automatically blocks all of them. But as you say, they can be unblocked fairly readily for valid educational reasons. Unfortunately some people don’t think it is worth the bother and so opportunities are missed.

Its much the same in your old stamping ground of Argyll & Bute – as I mentioned in my blog when we moved to the new building.

Websense has recently been cranked up to ‘paranoid’ meaning we couldn’t access SCHOLAR, any University entrance related sites or even the school’s own online resource site – http://www.getintohabit.co.uk

I’m a firm advocate of instilling responsibility in employees. Staff should be allowed free reign over the content available, on the understanding that clear policies and sanctions exist. If a teacher is deliberately looking at inappropriate material then they should be disciplined or even dismissed.

I’d love to be able to show youtube clips in my teaching, play appropriate educational ‘games’ and indulge in a bit of Web 2.0 – type stuff, but as Alan stated the double handling at home and school makes it too much hassle.

I’d be glad to chat to you further about this, I’m piloting edublogging as a member of The Highland Council, I can access my blog fine through the system, it has been barred at all. Though some of the streaming and clips won’t work. Edublogs.com hasn’t been barred.

There is an E-Safety steering group in Highland set up to look at both Internet Safety and Responsible Use, Jim H and I will be looking to get blogging sites lifted at some point. I just want to make it clear that the council is not opposed to staff having their own blog. Happy to chat further, give me a call or email, I’m on the outlook. Louise

Alan’s point is well made. It’s very frustrating.
Also there is a number of teachers who will only take steps forward at school where you are physically there to “rescue” them if necessary. So there is no opportunity to encourage these teachers to explore blogs. Even if you get some specific ones unblocked, the whole exciting, serendipitous nature of following links from one blog to another is lost.

[...] to access some blogging sites but had them restricted by the web filtering software Websense. Andrew sympathised about the problems that sometimes surrounds filtering in schools and made the [...]