managing whitelist for entire school?

[Flakes]

Hi all,

 

This is my first question on here, i work as an IT Technician at a High School. We have been running a very successful whitelist on the computer rooms over lunch and break(cut behaviour problems in half, and now we actually have kids working over lunch!), however now we wish to expand and push the whitelist for students over the entire day. Now here is the gothca bit we dont have enough time to manage a whitelist and keep it up-to-date at a realtime level, so we would like to give teachers access to the list so they can add websites as required, the end goal being having a list of sites so large that the kids are not restricted enough to prevent them working but they do not have access to any games...

 

Currently we run ISA Server 2004..

 

Do any of you have a similiar set-up to what we are looking for or can recommend any programs that could sit over the top of ISA, allowing teachers to add there own websites?

 

Thanks,

Flakes

[Edu-IT]

Could you not get a filtering system that let's you block categories?

[tom_newton]

Keeping a whitelist is pretty tough.

We may have some interesting answers on whitelists in the middling future... oh the plans, the plans.

 

If it is games you are worried about though, SmoothWall are really cracking down on these - by BETT we hope to be at a stage where the problem is effectively solved with the flash filter - leaving the handful of other types of games to be URL/context blocked.

[Flakes]

yes, the web is currently monitored and filtered by the LEA and ourselves, however there are millions of game websites and proxy sites and the kids are always one step ahead.... so we have been playing with the idea of a whitelist but we decided that a whitelist would only really work when it could be updated on the fly, eventually giving a long list of safe sites.

[FN-GM]

yes, the web is currently monitored and filtered by the LEA and ourselves, however there are millions of game websites and proxy sites and the kids are always one step ahead.... so we have been playing with the idea of a whitelist but we decided that a whitelist would only really work when it could be updated on the fly, eventually giving a long list of safe sites.

 

I would buy a better filter and host it yourself then.

 

I actually asked your same question for when our students are banned. I never got it sorted

[Flakes]

FN-GM, if you create a Disabled_Internet group in Active Directory, then create a Deny rule in ISA for that group you can effectively disable student internet on an account basis. if you require a whitelist for the students to visit while they are blocked i would recommend just allowing them to go to your VLE platform, mymaths, lingua-scope etc(depending what your school uses)...