Request to allow Facebook/Twitter to Sixth Form Students for short period of time....

Afternoon one and all!

I've got ticket logged where a Teacher has asked for me to unblock Facebook/Twitter for a class that are doing an e-marketing course. She said that she will either provide us with a set of names that will need access to this, or she will provide me with a list of Workstations that they will be using.

I've checked our filtering for LancsNGFL, and it is allowed, but we've blocked it so that everyone doesn't spend all day monging about on there.

Now if I add it to the approved list, everyone will have access to it - which is what we don't want to happen.

I was thinking of trying to find a way of somehow creating a group that would only have access to it, or somehow locking down those Workstations so that only those ones have access to it (Think that would be harder, plus the potential is there for other students not on the course to abuse it).

Any thoughts? Has anyone here had a similiar problem/request like this?

*Begins meditating on the problem*

have an active directory holding group called social networking (like you get the administrators, power users, maintenance etc). Add the students to the holding group (they should still be in their file tree).

Allow access on the proxy system via that holding group and you are sorted, then revoke access later.

..... I love you!

I shall get on with this now and let you know how it goes!

If you have a filtering policy agreed by management, why are you now tossing it all away?

Had a similar request not too long ago.. checked with management and they agreed not to allow the request. Doesn't matter if it's for a short period of time.. policy is policy.

I'm not tossing the whole lot away - the idea of blocking Social Networks here was to stop Students sitting around in lessons playing on Facebook when they should be working (Yeah, the same applies to staff!), and is still in effect.
But with this course (The select few that are doing it) will need to have access to Facebook/Twitter to see how a marketing campaign would run. This is because there's a lot of companies that would use both of those for marketing campaigns, updates, etc to reach out to the general public, companies, etc.
So in this case, only those few would have access to it during those lessons.