PLNweek-4post10

For my PLN I read an article called “More on Filtering” by Karl Fisch at Fischbowl.blogspot.com. It talked about whether or not it was a good idea to use filtering on school computers. When they mean filtering they are talking about blocking students from certain websites. At first I thought that this is a good idea because the sites that they are blocking we don’t really need anyways. They block things like Myspace, Face book and YouTube; those sites are more for social and entertainment purposes. Then I started to see what some other people thought about this and some made some good points. Avereel2011 said “We may not necessarily need to use these sights at the current moment, but sometime during the school year, we may want to add a video to enhance a project, but because of filtering, we would not be able to even view the video” I thought that this was a very interesting point because there are other ways to learn one of them including video, so is it possible that filtering is limiting us to our learning ability?

Then again if these things weren’t blocked I think students might more tempted to go on these sites and get off track. So I think that these sights should be off limits to students on a daily bases, but in some situations I think that the teachers should be able to “unblock” it and make these sights viewable maybe only from his/her computer, then block it again. Some kids that I know have already figured out how to get by this filtering system, so I think that there should be a password that only the faculty knows. Otherwise kids can get in, and teachers can not, and that ruins the whole idea of having these filters.