Blogger.com in schools

[ccx9010]

Hi all.

 

I'm trying to find out if it would be acceptable to unblock 'Blogger.com' on our school network, as several students are asking to use it to support their university applications. Any advice/things I should know before making a choice?

 

Apologies if this is in the wrong section.

[NB9457]

When it comes to unfiltering it is mostly down to you and your school. Have you passed it by any SLT, have any staff mentioned it to you, have you heard of this system/software/site before, have you been and the site and had a look yourself, could you just link the specific pages needed?

 

Every time I'm asked I have a look at the site, see if it's beneficial and necessary and then I will then I will do it.

[ccx9010]

Yeah, i've looked at the site but the search function concerns me in regards to available content. As for staff, yes they've asked about it also.

[psydii]

I would expect that if you have a dynamic content filter, rather than a URL Blacklist based filter, unblocking blogger.com would be fine, provided the dynamic analysis would still drop blogs with inappropriate content.

 

I don't have one, so would be very interested to hear from those that do...

[ccx9010]

Would you class Smoothwall UTM as a dynamic content filter?

[localzuk]

It really depends on how well dynamic filtering works. Here, we have dynamic filtering but if we put a rule in place to whitelist a site, it disables the active filter also... So we would never unblock such a site here.

[psydii]

It really depends on how well dynamic filtering works. Here, we have dynamic filtering but if we put a rule in place to whitelist a site, it disables the active filter also... So we would never unblock such a site here.

 

Which filter do you use?

 

I would hope that one might be able to allow a class of sites (say: Blogs) while leaving blocked other classes (say: Violence, Extremism, Pornography, 'Criminal Skills') so that blogs would, in general, make it through, but specific posts/blogs that contained content from still blocked classes would be filtered out.

 

(I'm on the look out for 'the prefect' filtering solution as part of our review of our approach to CP issues in light of PREVENT)

[localzuk]

We're with SWGfL, and use the RM SafetyNet filter.