Blocked

I'm going to take some time to go back and again post about one of the most pressing issues with the school 2.0 idea... fear. As you can probably guess from the title of my post the biggest consequence is the blocking of so many useful internet tools, it's something that really gets to me in school. The one thing that gets to me most about it though is it never seems to be consistent, you can access something one day and not the other. And well, I think that this shows that the authority deciding what's to be blocked and what's not aren't quite sure themselves about it all. And surely if this is the case they need some kind of guidance?

For example, I remember for a long time I wasn't able to access blogger in school, I think the category it fell under for being blocked was either "chatrooms" or "forums", and to me, this shows that the authority for this content blocking need some sort of education about these sorts of tools, to settle in their minds what these technologies do and why they are not a risk. This is a huge task, educating so many people and making them more comfortable with the technology... in turn giving them the confidence to leave the technologies unblocked, but it's a hurdle which needs to be overcome for School 2.0 to succeed. Now of course, there's a difference in opinion, while I may not think this is asking for too much, many may disagree and say that spending the time money and effort to teach about these technologies and show they aren't a risk, then re-haul all these content filtering systems is a huge ask. However, it depends how you decide to weigh it up... from my point of view, the benefits outweigh the costs, then again, I'm not in the know when it comes to organising training and re-defining content filters in schools... but what I do know is how much potential is there, and I've seen that they can be so useful in classroom situations, and if the word of a student isn't good enough then you can wait for the results of a small experiment I'll be carrying out soon with Mr. W... but I'll tell you more about that later.

Like I said, it's just a matter of opinion, and I'll leave it to you, but I just think it's such a shame that a lot of this useful content is blocked... and especially seeing as if it remains the same, School 2.0 can't happen as we would hope it could. By now I'm sure most people are agreed on the potential of all this technology in schools. But for me, I think it's time for action, and time to really put the point across that we need to start moving forward with School 2.0, one small step at a time, my ideal starting point being with this, the blocking of such useful web technologies.

Blogged with Flock