Students sharing flash games files over Google Docs..

[Towelie88]

Hi All

 

Been lurking here for a while, Always find this forum very helpful.

 

We are having a bit of a flash games epidemic in the classes at the moment. We recently changed our email system to be Gmail based, and are using Google docs for students to submit work etc. The kids have now figured out that this is a neat way of sharing large documents full of flash games. Obviously due to these being stored on Google servers we are having a hard time thinking of ways to control these, We can't block usage of flash files totally as IT lessons do a lot of flash based work,

 

Has anyone had a similar issue to this, and has anyone come up with any ingenious ways of blocking these? We have a list of the file names that we want to block as they are all being sent around in one particular document.

 

All we can do at the moment is scan and delete any .swf from students home directories. But they are back in there from the next day!

 

Any advice would be appreciated!

[Geoff]

Block flash usage for the students in question?

[jugglerjoe]

no idea if it would work....but possibly a user logon script could be the way forward here to do the scan? or maybe make the particular document that has the games in an enemy of your virus scanner so it wont let them use it?

 

I am in a very lucky school where i havent had to do something like this. Our headteacher says that should be down to teachers to control in their classroom >_<

Edited June 13, 2013 by jugglerjoe

[sted]

i assume they run them as a normal file that then opens ie?

 

if so just use gpp to create a "wrong" fille association that opens them in say notepad

 

might work

[jugglerjoe]

thats the problem sted. that is a good idea but he still needs students to be able to use flash for lessons... >_<

[X-13]

There's always the option of blocking flash by default and adding exceptons for specific sites... But, this will only work if teachers let you know what websites they need before they need them.

[cogrady84]

 

All we can do at the moment is scan and delete any .swf from students home directories. But they are back in there from the next day!

 

 

Considering this is what you are doing at the moment, would there be any weight in installing FSRM on your file server and creating a file screening rule for .swf files targetted to your student homes? This will at least remove the manual process of removing the .swf files, as they would not be able to save them in the first place?

[Geoff]

I wonder what does the school AUP say on the matter? If policing this problem from an IT perspective is impractical/impacts teaching and learning I suggest kicking the problem across to pastoral care and/or start handing out the detention slips.

[kevin_lane]

Yea I agree with the last 2 posts