Ed Tech Review » Internet Safety

Finding a Balance in Filtering

MrYardley — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:51:00 +0000

It has been a long time since I last posted. I typically post from school after my work hours where I have a lot of my educational resources available for reference. Our district however has expanded the reach of there filtering software to block all Blogger sites because a few of these sites may be inappropriate. I am looking at other solutions, but any hosted service that is primarily for blogs is also blocked. I see a definite need for filtering software, but wiping out a powerful educational tool, because there might be a little swearing on a page is overstepping the bounds. No filtering software can protect from everything, but with a vigilant teacher and appropriate supervision most problems can be eliminated. The filtering software should be set to block only the worst of sites, rather than blocking huge blocks of content where 90% is good and legitimate, and of the remaining 10% most only have a few offensive words here or there.

Keeping Kids Safe on the Net

MrYardley — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:01:00 +0000

Website: http://www.ikeepsafe.org
Grade: B+
Cost: Free

The Internet Keep Safe Coalition group teaches basic rules of Internet safety to children and parents, reaching them online and in school. On this site you will find great free videos, online books, worksheets and more all aimed at teaching kids to be safe online. Kids are being targeted at astonishing rates through many different methods. The best way to protect kids is to teach them how to be safe. This site offers a powerful resource to help us reach kids in a way that is interesting to kids.

Protecting Teachers from Jail Time.

MrYardley — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 19:48:00 +0000

I read about the story below and was a little bit surprised that lack of knowledge and caution could lead to such big problems. The legal fact is that whether we intend to or not it phonographic material is shown to students we are liable. If you read further the material was left on the screen for some time because the teacher involved did not turn the computer off. As teachers we are responsible to take basic steps to protect our students and protect our computers from inappropriate content. Here are a few things that we can do help protect our PC’s from unwanted intrusions.

Use recent windows software. The machine she was using was running windows 98 which is no longer supported by Microsoft which means it is no longer getting security updates. You may not need Vista but you should have a version that still receives support which is currently Windows 2000 and above.
Keep your Operating Systems security updates up to date.
Use anti virus software and keep it up to date.
Use spy ware software and run on a regular basis.
Turn of pictures in your email program. Many times we receive junk email or spam that have pornographic pictures. Most programs will let you download the pictures in individual emails that you approve when you turn photos off.
If problems arise turn it off and try to fix it when students are gone. If you get one pop up you will likely get more. It is best not to deal with it until students are gone.
Never leave students unsupervised!!!

There are a lot of technical challenges that arise when a machine gets infected, and it is impossible to stop everything, but if you are making the best effort possible to protect children and documenting your efforts you will likely avoid the challenges this teacher faced

This article is from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070214-8850.html

Teacher faces jail time for porn pop-ups

2/14/2007 3:31:53 PM, by

Who is responsible for keeping the computers at school clean and child-safe? A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of “risking injury to a child.” Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.