Unfiltering social media websites for a BTEC course

[JimHew]

Hi everyone,

 

First-time poster here.

 

We are running into a bit of trouble with one of the courses that one of our IT teachers is running. They are running an a-level course this year and to complete it the students will need to run a social media campaign. The deadline is looming and the IT teacher is starting to panic, SLT are remaining quiet, and we (techs) are being pressured into making things happen.

 

Now, social media sites are all filtered, so we are tying to figure out how to allow access to them, but restrict it to lesson time only. We obviously don't want to blanket-allow all students access as that would be chaos.

 

We have toyed with two ideas:

• Individually allowing each of the student's normal profile to bypass the RM SafetyNet filter using the staff proxy. But this would mean enabling and then disabling this for each student, every week at the start and end of the lesson.
  
• Creating new, blank profiles that we can assign to students and have them constantly unfiltered, but blocking the accounts (in AD, en masse) whenever the lesson is not running, to stop the students from logging on outside of lesson.
  

 

It is an Edexcel course and this is the criteria the students need to meet:

3/BC.D3 Demonstrate individual responsibility, creativity, and effective self-management in the planning and use of social media in a business context.

3/C.M3 Optimise the content, format and features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan.

3/C.P5 Produce business-related content using appropriate features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan.

3/C.P6 Review data obtained on social media usage and interaction.

 

Has anyone out there had any experience with doing this kind of thing, maybe even with this course?

 

Oh, and to make things worse, our enterprise provider is changing our ISP this Thursday 2nd Feb (Monday 30th Jan today), which will bring with it a new piece of filtering software (that we haven't had hands-on with yet) called NetSweeper. If anyone could give us a heads up with this new filter and if we can do what we want more simply, that would be fab.

 

Thanks everyone, a bit of a stinker, I know!

 

James