After having access to many web 2.0 sites last year I was bummed to start off this school year with almost everything I use blocked. I am a teacher and staff accounts are supposed to have access to most of the things I requested to have unblocked. Tech support did try to help but after almost an hour of trying to figure out why staff accounts didn’t have the privileges the filter was showing us as having the tech support guy had to leave to try and fix it later. Later must mean sometime this week, I hope. And this is our first week back at school. This doesn’t solve the problem of student access but that is another tech request I have pending – to make a separate network in my room with access to the sites we plan to use. And I think the list I put together is really just the bare minimum!
Here’s a list of the sites I requested to have unblocked:
http://twitter.com/
http://tweetchat.com/
http://tweetgrid.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.musopen.com/
http://picasaweb.google.com/
http://youtube.com/
http://video.google.com/a/csd49.org (this is our Google Apps video site!)
http://readitlaterlist.com/
http://www.scribd.com/
http://dropbox.com/
http://drop.io/
Last year they had to block iTunes because we were having bandwidth issues. YouTube and iTunes were blamed for our bandwidth topping off. I keep thinking that our bandwidth issues would be best dealt with through educating our students and by directly working with our students instead of letting them work alone or banning cell phones and iPods. We need to teach our students how to participate in our school network appropriately so that they can be connected and not disconnected. I guess it will start with educating our staff.
Let’s see how long it will take before we have access in my class!
