This week’s reading on web filtering caught my
attention. This is such an important thing. “A district can take many steps to ensure that its
students are protected from harmful, obscene, or otherwise unworthy websites.
It can establish guidelines for appropriate Internet usage, create acceptable
use policies, or provide training for teachers.” We have all of this in place
from the web content filter to the acceptable use policy to the trained
teachers. Yet last week we had an issue at one of our
elementary campuses. A student typed in
lesbian and the filter let everything through.
The teacher was mortified when she walked past the student’s desk and
saw the website the student had up. She
quickly had the student close the screen and she called the technology
department and asked them how this could happen.
It did happen and it happened because the district web security product
vendor ran an update several weeks earlier and the default had been changed
when searching through Google on what to allow through. As soon as the vendor
was called they told the district about the update and the district changed the
default back to block specific things.
My question was why would a vendor do something like that and not notify
its users. If you can’t trust your web
filtering vendor, who can you trust? We have to have web filtering because
there’s just too much out on the web. Unfortunately several weeks went by while
this filter didn't work and we can only hope that not many students were
affected by this and we wouldn't know without doing much research. We have to be more careful to be checking for
things in the future.
Ullman, E. (2009, July 23). Web filtering that
works. Tech and Learning. Retrieved on November 17, 2009, from:
http://www.techlearning.com/article/22092
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