does this need to be blocked??

[mikeymike]

firstly i work in a private special need school so the boys can over-react .i have been asked by someone on the management to block miniclip as he feels it is used too much by some boys. I mentioned the fact that i could be blocking stuff all day if sites like this needed to go. I also mentioned that i believe we should be educating our boys on using the internet appropriately and maybe allowing them to use game sites as a carrot at the end of the lesson for say 10 mins or so.
Basically he does not want to challenge boys on not using the sites when work should be done instead cause of the over-reaction.
just wondering what your thoughts are and if you allow game sites to be played???

[mattx]

Nothing wrong with mini clip - one of the most popular sites with the boys at our school.....

[witch]

I think it depends on the level of over-reaction. If the children do tend to overreact (and I've seen special needs children here so I know how they can be) then I probably would ban it - to be honest whilst it is a site children love, I think you have special circumstances

[PaulBM]

We only allow games in one room outside of lesson times. We spend a fair amount of time banning the endless stream of games sites too.

[mikeymike]

We only allow games in one room outside of lesson times. We spend a fair amount of time banning the endless stream of games sites too.

and that was one of my points as im the only technician here i would be doing that all day

[Sirbendy]

some of the miniclip content is perhaps a little close to the line, I would say...we've banned it here. TBH, kids have stopped attempting games sites now. Suits me.

The little sods do try and embed the flash in their docs though, or on the shared area, or their user areas...

[sidewinder]

Banned by LEA here, as is anything that even borders on being interesting or fun

[Whyyoublockmyinternets]

I use the rule of thumb between 8:30 and 2:40 - does the site have any educational purpose or value?
If so, it's fine (some of the BBC stuff for example)
It not, straight block.

[mikeymike]

Banned by LEA here, as is anything that even borders on being interesting or fun

but to those of you that do filter these particular sites how do you do it. do you literally go through them one by one??

[Whyyoublockmyinternets]

That's one way Mike, or you would need a proper content filter. We are looking at Bloxx here at the minute but for a lot of people that's going to be very expensive...

[Sirbendy]

we use Bloxx, and Policycentral Enterprise as our "eyes and ears", and NetSupport to monitor and "local ban" on a class by class basis. Every week, the NetSupport URL lists get imported into Bloxx.

[bossman]

We only allow our students access to one games website which some of the teachers hate whilst others love (cos they can then leave the little tykes to play on games while they themselves trawl the internet looking for cheap this and that) but we use our own filter system IPCop which has been very good to date and uptime is approx a year.

[Whyyoublockmyinternets]

We are using PCE as well Sirbendy, looking forward to having something like Bloxx in. The amount of disruption caused by flash games and the like is unreal!

[mikeymike]

We are using PCE as well Sirbendy, looking forward to having something like Bloxx in. The amount of disruption caused by flash games and the like is unreal!

so using software like bloxx then would that automatically pick up game site names and filter straight away or would you still need to filter one by one??

[Whyyoublockmyinternets]

so using software like bloxx then would that automatically pick up game site names and filter straight away or would you still need to filter one by one??

Yes, the appliance sit's as a proxy on your network, linked it your OS of choice (AD for Winderz, LDAP for everything else) and then allows/denies access to sites based on a load of pre-set catagories. So, games set to "Off", and anything remotely game related get's blocked. They do so by reading meta tags, headers, and picking up on words in the pages of the site requested.