Walled Garden Pro's & Con's

[Guest richard]

I have been asked to come up with a document detailing the pro's and con's of implementing a walled garden for a secondary school.

 

To honest I was wondering if anyone had already written something about this that I could use for "research" purposes as I have enough to do already without trwling the 'net looking for stuff.

[NetworkGeezer]

By walled garden do you mean web filtering? In most cases this should be self explanatory. The only complication might white listing versus balck listing. That is whether, only specific sites are allowed all others banned or whether specific bad sites are banned.

 

Do a forum search on 'filtering', 'blocking' etc.

 

Alterntively do you mean having lab of machines or a whole VLAN where students have enhanced access rights.

 

There was an extensive thread on this where one EduGeek was taken to task for allowing students admin rights on classroom PCs. It mitigation the scheme involved using a hardware disk restore device.

[Guest richard]

By walled garden do you mean web filtering? In most cases this should be self explanatory. The only complication might white listing versus balck listing. That is whether, only specific sites are allowed all others banned or whether specific bad sites are banned.

 

Do a forum search on 'filtering', 'blocking' etc.

 

Alterntively do you mean having lab of machines or a whole VLAN where students have enhanced access rights.

 

There was an extensive thread on this where one EduGeek was taken to task for allowing students admin rights on classroom PCs. It mitigation the scheme involved using a hardware disk restore device.

 

What they want to do is to block everything locallyand only allow access to specific sites that have been appoved by the ICT steering group. We already have filtering in place both locally and via our ISP but the my boss wnats more.

[petectid]

We use white lists here as well as the local authority filtering. If a member of staff wishes to give access to the Internet then only the sites in their white list are allowed. We are finding this works better with some groups as they are not drifting off task by loading up some games site or site that has no bearing on their study. As you will know already it is impossible to control web access effectively through the use of blacklists, there are just to many sites out there to list or categorise, they will always find another site even using different languages to search for them.

[bossman]

We have our own filtering via Custom expression list, blacklist, Whitelist, blocked URLs and allowed URLs. Using IPcop and it seems to work very well so good in fact that the pupils and best of all the Teachers are always complaining they can't get on stuff which they then have to submit via IT support posrtal where we vet and using school policy either grant or deny their request.

[Guest richard]

I've just found an "idiots guide" here which gives her the basic info for now.