Every school is required to have a network filter onsite, but if you’re reading this, you probably know that already.
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The internet is an ever growing digital learning environment. Literally millions of websites are created every day. If you have a mediocre network filter, you likely spend tons of time playing whack a mole -- adding blocked websites every time a teacher or parent notifies you. If you have a stronger network filter, it probably gets ahead of some of this content and blocks it in real time. Network filtering as a whole does a decent job when it comes to blocking unknown and potentially dangerous websites out there.
But what if a website isn’t necessarily bad? Or good? Or not so easily defined?
Network filters are a critical part of student safety, but they can’t manage dynamic websites effectively. Sure you can block pretty easily, but what about Google searches? How do you manage social media? Or perhaps the most important one -- YouTube.
Network filters approach these dynamic sites in one of two ways. More simplistically, they will allow you to block or allow. So yes, you’ll make the decision on behalf of your 4,000 students that YouTube will forever be banned. Sounds a little Ray Bradbury-ish to me…
If you have a more complex and capable web filter, they’ll have a bit more detail on how they manage dynamic sites. They might allow you to filter certain parts of the website more effectively. For example, only allow specific YouTube channels, or keywords.
This is better, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Not even close, really.
YouTube is an amazing platform. There are millions of hours of great K-12 content for free. There are passionate creators and former educators going above and beyond to impact your classrooms. It really is special.
On the other hand it is incredibly dangerous. Provocative music videos accessible to any age, violence and distractions constantly depicted, even sometimes pornography that your filter won’t catch.
The simple answer here is to utilize all the good content and leave out the bad. And the simple solution is Kindu TV Plus, which scrapes all the good content for you (our user base of active teachers), categorizes and makes it accessible, and provides tracking and engagement data across your student body.
Try us out for 30 days free, :)
Written by in August of 2021
