Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning.

The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school. Each of these issues plays an important part in the equation that influences school policy around filtering websites. For example, do students and teachers use social media sites like Edmodo or even Facebook for class purposes? Are educational videos on YouTube part of teachers’ curriculum? In large school districts, does it make sense to have individual school policies? Are students allowed to use their cell phones?

Part of the investigation into what filtering policies to put in place revolves around understanding current rules and regulations — and that’s the problem, according to Michelle Luhtala, a librarian at New Cannan High School and one of the primary organizers of Banned Websites Awareness Day.

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are,” she said. “Most people are working off of policies that predate 2003, and so much has happened since then, and continues to happen.”

In a recent survey of nearly 700 teachers, principals, and school librarians, conducted by MMS Education and co-sponsored by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data, 55% of respondents said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access to Web 2.0 tools (social media sites) for teachers, and 23% said they had very restrictive policies. And when it came to students, 44% said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access, and 47% said they had very restrictive policies.

Most of the blocked sites are either social media sites, or have some element of public sharing of information, and that’s where school administrators need to be more flexible, Luhtala said. “Administration more than teachers need to open their minds to the value and potential of social networking for educational use,” wrote a survey respondent. “CIPA needs to be spelled out more specifically or made clearer to IT in education so that filters are not blocking sites unnecessarily.”

In the meantime, what should educators do when they try to access a site in school that’s blocked by the school’s filter? Luhtala offers the following advice.

1. PRESENT FACTS. Direct people to the Department of Education’s suggestions in this article (posted below). “This is a really valuable resource for tech directors who aren’t well informed about the details of legal aspects,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes IT directors tell other IT directors who say, ‘Just do what the lawyers say,’ and it becomes a giant case of the game Telephone. The DOE is the ultimate authority, so this article forces them to look at their agenda and policies.”
2. CONSIDER SMART POLICIES. Study CoSN’s Guide for Acceptable Use Policies for filtering and other issues, and their recent report Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, which clearly states, “Before steps are taken to impose limits on the use of social media and mobile technologies in schools, policymakers and educators need to consider the consequences for learning that such restrictions would produce… Such action should carefully consider the advantages of social media for learning and that these guidelines for responsible use bring media into mentored environments where they can be safely explored and shared.”
3. CREATE A DIALOGUE. Start a conversation with people who manage the filtering system. “A lot of policies have been in place for 10 years or more,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes they assume products are inherently bad, but if they understand that they can be tools for learning, they can see constructive purposes.”
4. GET AN EARLY ADOPTER ON BOARD AND TAKE BABY STEPS. Collaborate with an innovator, and see if you can work on a project that includes a site you want unblocked. Get parent and school authorization to try out the pilot project and document the process along the way in order to share best practices. Try it out for five weeks and see how it goes.
5. USE AND SHARE RESOURCES. Read the American Association of School Librarian’s Essential Resources site and add your own resources to help others spread the message and educate other educators.
6. WADE INTO SOCIAL MEDIA. For those who have yet to start using social media with students, Luhtala suggests “take steps to try to understand what all the fuss is about.” But that will take time and training, as one survey respondent pointed out. “I believe it offers us potential opportunities to further engage our students. However, in order to maximize this potential we must provide teachers and students with additional trainings,” the anonymous respondent wrote in the survey.

When you’re ready to take action, here are the list of myths dispelled directly by the Department of Education’s Technology Director Karen Cator:

• Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
• Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
• Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
• Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
• Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
• Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Getty

Schools that receive discounts for Internet access through the federal E-rate funding are required to implement a number of measures, like creating an Internet safety policy and filtering and blocking access to certain types of online content. To that end, The Children’s Internet Protection Act, CIPA, addresses concerns about the type of online materials that children can access at school.

We’ve written several times about some of the frustration and confusion that CIPA and filtering causes, and we’ve talked to the Department of Education’s Karen Cator for clarification about what the law really requires.

But as more schools begin to implement one-to-one computer programs, providing each student with a laptop or a net-book or even an iPad, there are new wrinkles in thinking about CIPA. After all, these devices are meant to be used at school and at home.

Currently most schools filter their network. There are a number of ways in which they do this, and a number of companies that they turn to for the technology to do so.

But if schools are just filtering the Internet on the premises, what happens when students take their computers home? How do schools monitor or block access to Web sites when students are using their school-provided laptops on their family’s home networks? And are they even required to do so?

Some schools with one-to-one programs have installed filtering software onto the devices they send home. Such is the case beginning this year for the laptops that are distributed to students in Casper, Wyoming’s Natrona County School District. The school district has had a one-to-one program for a number of years. In the past, the permission slips that went home with the devices at the beginning of the school year made certain that parents were aware that the devices had no filtering software installed. Parents had to sign that they “accept full responsibility for supervision when my child’s Internet use is not in a school setting.”

But the school district has opted this year to expand its filtering efforts by adding social networking sites to the list of blocked sites, and by installing filtering software directly onto every Apple laptop that each 6th- through 12th-grader receives. That means that when those district-owned computers are at home, the filtering is still in place.

According to Mark Antrim, Associate Superintendent for Facilities and Technology, the change in the way in which Natrona County School District handles its filtering was largely a response to parents’ concerns about what their children were doing on the Internet at home.

But are schools actually required to install filtering on computing devices that head home?

While CIPA does make it clear about the requirements to filter the Internet at schools and at libraries, it’s not clear if this applies to the computers themselves. If schools are paying for 3G connectivity on these devices, then yes, CIPA applies. Otherwise “it’s a gray area,” a spokesperson from the FCC told me. The agency is working on clarifying how the rules on filtering apply in these sorts of cases.

It’s going to be an increasingly important issue that the FCC tackles, particularly as one-to-one programs proliferate. As it currently stands, different schools are adopting different approaches to filtering on one-to-one devices, some opting to install software on the devices, others leaving it up to parents to monitor what kids do when they’re using the computers at home.

We’d love to hear from readers what policies come with their take-home devices.

Lenny Gonzalez

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing from frustrated teachers about surprising websites their schools block — everything from National Geographic to Skype. One even wrote in to say that CommonCore.org was blocked.

A few readers questioned the judgment of teachers who use their own mobile devices to allow their students access to blocked sites. One reader, identified as Cwells67, goes so far as to claim: “If we do not block inappropriate sites ‘to the extent practicable,’ meaning ‘if you can block inappropriate sites, you are legally bound to block them,’ we will lose ALL FEDERAL FUNDING.”

To clear up some of the confusion around these comments and assertions, I went straight to the top: the Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator.

Cator parsed the rules of the Childrens Internet Protection Act, and provided guidance for teachers on how to proceed when it comes to interpreting the rules. To that end, here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools.

1. Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
2. Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
3. Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
4. Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
5. Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
6. Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Here’s the full transcript of my Q&A with Karen Cator.

Q. Please describe what CIPA does and does not mandate.

A. CIPA does require that any school that funds Internet access or their internal network connections with E-rate has to implement filters to block students’ access to content that could be harmful to minors.

The best way of thinking about this whole topic is in terms of “rules, tools and schools.”
There are rules in place for a good reason. CIPA does require that we block or filter inappropriate sites, but if sites are found that are deemed appropriate they can be unblocked. So having the process in place for unblocking sites is definitely important.

Q. Is it illegal for teachers to access these sites, too?

A. These sites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites. They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.

Rules are in place to attempt to protect minors form inappropriate materials. We also need school-based rules –  usually in the form of acceptable use policies that students sign that say, “I will use this computer or access the Internet, and I agree to abide by rules in my school.” Sometimes it will say that if you come across something inappropriate that you shut it down immediately and tell an adult.

The second way to address this topic is by thinking about tools. These are technology tools that are put in place to filter sites that are inappropriate. These filters are getting better and better. What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game. These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering. Better filters would be incredibly helpful.

The third way to address the topic is at school or home in the form of education.
How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space. We also want students to be nice to each other, and not to engage in bullying, in an online space where their voice is amplified and persistent. We want students to grow up to be good digital citizen.

So there are rules that are in place, the technology tools in the form of more intelligent filters, and then it is an absolute necessity to provide good digital education for this generation of students. And that requires providing professional development for adults working with these students.

Q. Just to be clear, are schools or teachers circumventing rules if they show YouTube videos or other blocked sites to students?

A. Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules. The rule is to block inappropriate sites. If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it. Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.

All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.

If a filtering system is not intelligent enough to sort sites out, then the teacher is the next best one to do so. If a site is blocked for a teacher, then the I.T. person can unblock it if that’s the way the network is set up.

From the DOE’s National Education Technology Plan:

Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety on the Internet

E-Rate is a federal program that supports connectivity in elementary and secondary schools and libraries by providing discounts on Internet access, telecommunications services, internal network connections, and basic maintenance. Schools, school districts, and consortia can receive discounts on these services ranging from 20 to 90 percent depending on their level of poverty and geographic location.

Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on compliance with several federal laws designed to ensure student privacy and safety on the Internet. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet access or internal network connections with E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ access to content that may be harmful to minors, including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities.

Ensuring student safety on the Internet is a critical concern, but many filters designed to protect students also block access to legitimate learning content and such tools as blogs, wikis, and social networks that have the potential to support student learning and engagement. More flexible, intelligent filtering systems can give teachers (to whom CIPA restrictions do not apply) access to educationally valuable content. On the other end of the spectrum, some schools and districts filter students’ online activities with proxy servers that meet CIPA requirements but are easy to get around, minimizing their utility for managing and monitoring students’ online activity.

CIPA also has posed challenges to accessing school networks through students’ own cell phones, laptop computers, and other Internet access devices to support learning activities when schools cannot afford to purchase devices for each student. Applying CIPA-required network filters to a variety of student-owned devices is a technical challenge that may take schools months or years to implement. However, districts such as Florida’s Escambia County Schools have created technical solutions and accompanying acceptable use policies (AUPs) that comply with CIPA regulations, allowing Web-based learning on student devices to run on networks supported by federal E-Rate funding.

Source: Universal Service Administrative Company 2008.

But we wondered what other sites that can potentially be rich educational resources were blocked from schools that filter the Web. We asked teachers and here’s what we heard back.

• SKYPE. “I think this would be wonderful in the classroom,” the reader says. She’s right. Lots of teachers do use Skype to communicate with schools across the globe.
• NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. The “Kids” section alone provides a huge trove of beautiful presentations about wildlife, children’s literature, and cultures around the world.
• GLOGSTER. Educators and students can use this collaborative digital media site to create everything from videos about American presidents to interactive economics quiz.
• DROPBOX AND OTHER FILE-SHARING SITES. An easy way to send files, homework, assignments, and projects back and forth between students and teachers.
• BLOGSPOT AND OTHER PERSONAL BLOGGING PLATFORMS. One teacher says his site is flagged as “porn,” and another says her students use blocked access as an excuse not to do their homework. Class blogs — most of them free and simple to set up — are another great way for educators and students to communicate, participate in class discussions, and share information.
• KHAN ACADEMY. By virtue of the fact that the videos are hosted on YouTube, one teacher says none of these highly informative and engaging videos that describe everything from the Pythagorean Theorem to the cause and effect of the credit crisis, are available in her school.
• FLICKR. Want to show your photography teacher your photo assignment? Or participate in a collaborative project that includes photo-tagging? That’s a rhetorical question in one teacher’s case.
• FREEDOM TO TINKER. This site is “hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. You’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.”

Even the Department of Education realizes that blocked sites impede learning. Here’s Karen Cator, the director of Education Technology at the D.O.E. in a recent MindShift interview:

“The bottom line is that we do need to figure out how kids can be safe and out of harm’s way and not exposed to inappropriate materials online. But the filtering programs we have are fairly rudimentary. We need more intelligent filtering programs, safer search environments, smarter technologies so that people aren’t just shutting down large swaths of the Internet. There’s a lot on YouTube, for example, that could be safe and really instructive, but since it’s just in one bucket, a lot of schools just shut down YouTube.”

Frustrated educators are finding workarounds. Emma Dunbar, a middle school teacher in San Francisco, says she’s lucky enough to have an LCD projector and an ELMO visual presenter.

“I have an iPhone, which has YouTube for video and iTunes for podcasts and doesn’t have any blocked Internet sites,” she says. “So if I want to share something with my class, I do it through my iPhone and don’t even check on my district supplied computer anymore.”

And as another reader points out: “Things are increasingly interconnected and you might end up with blocking all access in the end.”

What surprising sites are blocked in your school?

[Additional reporting by Audrey Watters.]

Flickr:Husky

Project Tomorrow has just released the results of its Speak Up 2010 survey that asked over 300,000 students (and 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, and 3,500 administrators) about their thoughts on technology and learning in the classroom. The results confirm what many of us already know: Children have access to a wide variety of technologies, both at home and at school.

Take for example, these statistics comparing 6th graders today with those from just five years ago. In 2005, half of the 6th graders surveyed said they own a cellphone. Today, that same statistic holds true, but now an additional one-third say they own a smart phone. Almost 73% say they own an MP3 player, compared to just a third in 2005. Half of all 6th graders take tests online and three times as many have taken an online class as did in 2005.

Almost half of 6th grade girls and over a third of 6th grade boys say they regularly update their social networking profiles – up over 125% from five years ago. This, despite the fact that most 6th graders are not old enough to legally register on many of these sites.

But here is the statistic I found particularly striking. In 2005, the 6th graders complained that the Internet at their school was too slow. Today, their number one complaint is that school filters and firewalls block the websites they need to do their school work. It wasn’t just the main complaint of 6th graders — 71% of high school students and 62% of middle school students said that greater access to the Internet was the number one thing their school could do to make it easier to use technology.

Of course, removing filters and blocks at school is easier said than done. CIPA, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, requires that schools and libraries receiving federal E-rate funding have protective measures in place when it comes to students’ Internet access. But there’s often a gap between the mandate for and the practice of filtering and blocking.

CIPA requires institutions have an Internet safety policy that addresses blocking or filtering access to images that are obscene, child pornography or harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors). It requires a method for monitoring (not tracking) activities.

CIPA, along with the other regulations that are frequently invoked in discussions of blocking (namely FERPA and COPPA, both of which address data privacy), is meant to protect children online. But as teacher-educator Tom Whitby argues in a blog post, “World’s Simplest Online Safety Policy,” these regulations “were not created to keep students stuck in the past, educated in a disconnected school environment that shares little resemblance to the real world for which we should be preparing our children. These acts do not say we can’t publish online student’s names, videos, work, pictures, etc. They do not prevent us from using social media, YouTube, email, or any of those things that may be blocked in many school districts. An important goal of education is to strive for creation and publication of content by students. In today’s world technology and the Internet are an essential components of that process.”

Based on the results from the Speak Up 2010 survey, students seem to realize that, even if schools and districts are reluctant to do so. As students’ access to Internet — for better or worse — may be unrestricted at home, they are increasingly frustrated to find the tools they use the most are unavailable at school. Not surprisingly, many students also listed restrictions on cellphones as a major barrier to their technology usage at school. And while cellphones offer a lot of things (including, of course, access to teens’ favorite communication platform, text-messaging), a data plan also means that a student can have access to sites that a school may block on its network.

Blocking and banning, Whitby argues, are just the “easy way out,” and schools need to do more to help teach kids how to behave and search responsibly online. How can schools navigate what seem to be very challenging waters, balancing the demands of students for more open access and fears from adults that they’re not ready for it?