Blocking Game sites

[edie209]

Has anyone come up with a soulution to game sites on the web? It seems as soon as I block all the sites the kids are using, a new set of sites turn up.

Does anyone have an answer to this?

[Geoff]

Filter on content rather than the url(s). I do it with Dansguardian on Linux.

http://www.dansguardian.org

[mrforgetful]

I don't think it's possible to ban them all.

And don't forget departments such as SEN often want their students to have access during breaks etc when they stay inside.

To be perfectly honest this is something that I have a big bee in by bonet about. Just because it's possible to do something doesn't mean that it should replace discipline.
My feelings on filtering are. Protect the students. Stop porn. Stop chatrooms. Stop things that are damaging. When it comes to games, tell them when they can, and cannot, go on them. And enforce it.

Was funny here last year when the teacher mainly responsible for requesting sites banning told his students they had a free lesson. And couldn't get on anything.

[edie209]

I agree that it should be down to Teacher discipline but we all know how it really is.

I have had the main IT suite to full with students playing games while a cover teacher hides away in the corner of the room ignoring what is going on, and when I switch of the rooms access to the internet I am told that they are researching........

[sreiach]

I go the route of banning games as much as possible as well. Mostly in part because the teachers begged (ok not literally) for it. They found the were spending most of there class time walking up and down stopping kids from playing games. As soon as the teacher turned around the would just bring them back up. By blocking games the teacher felt comfortable spending more time helping students rather then trying to hunt down the game players.

We also use classroom monitoring software Sychroneyes. Which is awesome. The teacher can see every student's screen at a glance and block individuals ones as they please. However, this requires them sitting at their desk.

Like Geoff I use Dansgaurdian. That way you can ban phrases like <flash games> <play online> etc... takes care of the majority of sites.

[GrumbleDook]

We now use smoothwall (corporate guardian 5) and have it set to email us with the top 10 sites from the previous day .. Stephen will then look at them and update those that are games.

Occassionally he will look at the top 50 ... and about 20 of them are time wasting sites.