Pupil's Online Safety Fears - Eastern Daily Press Front Page

[ninjabeaver]

Well, one of my NM Norfolk colleagues texted me to get the EDP Today (Sat 12th Dec 2009) to read the latest headlines. What a waste of a front page.

 

NCC should be praised for only allowing a total of 25 images or offensive words through their filtering system.

That's 25 over two years covering 450+ schools, 100,000+ pupils and 30,000+ computers.

 

Children able to access pornography at school - Norfolk News - EDP24

 

Internet safeguards in schools - EDP24 Forums

 

Steve Downes blogs on Norfolk - and national - education issues - EDP24

 

Steve Downes, I don't know if you teach or have ever been involved with teaching or working in a school but may I suggest you go and work in a school for a year instead of pretending to know how it all works. Report / Blog on all the advancements made in Norfolk schools, all the innovations that school staff make and all the sacrifices made all the time with an ever dwindling budget and increasing class sizes. Perhaps talk to some people who do work in this environment might have been a good start.

 

Just made me a little cross reading it.

[synaesthesia]

Much better for someone to report about something nasty - just like on a personal level, you'll rarely get the recognition for doing something good but something goes wrong and you'll never hear the last of it. Plus of course the shock value of "KIDS CAN ACCESS PORN" when what they actually mean is "A kid saw a bit too much flesh in a single isolated incident which has long been dealt with" is a guaranteed read for the average Daily Mail reader.

 

It sickens me too really. If this guy really is concerned about it, perhaps as you say he should put his money where his mouth is and find out how it all works - why those incidents were made possible and what happened afterwards to remedy the issue and put more safeguards in place. Rather like instead of watching someone get hit by a bus and videoing it for Youtube - actually get off your lazy backside and go help the poor bugger.

[GrumbleDook]

Hey ... guess what! I know for a fact that hundreds of schools allow kids to see pictures of male and female genitalia every single year! In fact that actually go out of their way to do it! They don't even call it sex education, they fudge it with some fancy -ology words.

 

Yes ... let's start the petition to stop biology from being taught in schools!

 

 

Yes, there are lots of FoI requests going around atm and good on Norfolk for the work they are doing. I wonder if the same request went into the library service there to see how many students took out books on art which had pictures of naked men and women in them ... surely they would count as obscene considering what others consider as obscene on the internet (and yes ... I know everyone's personal view on what it obscene and what is titillation varies!)

 

But yes ... naff journalism again.

[kmount]

Yet another example of media in which unqualified people make sweeping and uninformed statements in a world they do not understand.

[pete]

Local paper has crap reporting, rent-a-quote MP spouts rubbish while not understanding the data, news at 11.

[plexer]

No system can be 100% effective. Plus I bet the kids bluetooth porn to each other anyway.

[tom_newton]

There is only one "100pc" method AFAIK - Here

[fafster]

There is only one "100pc" method AFAIK - Here

 

Joking aside, there are always going to be methods of circumventing web filters. It's just a matter of time before kids find them. So there are two options: Block access to the internet completely, or try a combination of limiting access to inappropriate content and educating staff and pupils on safe use.

[nicholab]

The picture with the article is quite frightening!!!

[localzuk]

Wow, the NCC are doing a heck of a good job I'd say! Although, that number most likely doesn't include *all* incidents.

 

I've probably dealt with that many incidents in 3 1/2 years at this school. With half of them being deemed just fine (usually women in lingerie/bikinis etc...)

[sidewinder]

What an absolute tool Steve Downes is

 

Even with the very restrictive filtering in place with our LEA, we get a few incidents where pupils find porn. Compared to the amount of times they've tried to find it and been blocked, its incredibly low

[CHR1S]

I think they are missing the point on how good kids are at finding ways to bypass filters and finding things they arnt supposed to... send them to Iraq I say, they will have those WMDs in no time and then the papers will have something else to churn garbage out over!!

[JJonas]

What about the way websites are changing. I am now getting regular hits from google thanks to its predictive text feature and there appears to be no way to turn it off and what about Microsofts Bing with it video preview feature being thrust upon us, but we found out about the Bing problem fairly quickly and it was blocked. There is not much that happens on our network that we dont know about but in many cases we are reacting to the way the web is being used because someone somewhere decided it would be a good idea to have this feature without thinking about what might happen if they did. Anyway the kids dont have filters at home so shouldn't we just turn off most of the filters and teach the kids how to use the internet responsibly.

[tom_newton]

Indeed - now I am posting from work, I will stop joking about cutting network cables. On a serious note, those 25 incidents are likely to be total cobblers. I would have thought many will go unreported, but also some "incidents" will be non-entities. It's like asking the police how many unreported burglaries there were last year.

 

We (SmoothWall) *know* for a fact that this is something which pretty much all education establishments in the country take seriously. I don't think anyone can easily be accused of doing a really bad job - much as these chaps would like to be able to do that. Some filtering is a good deal better than others, some is badly set up, some too easy to circumvent, some not flexible enough. It's a new problem though, by any reasonable metric. Where's the reports of kids still getting hit by bigger kids? We haven't eradicated that, and yet because it is "technology" there's this misguided belief it is going to be perfect.

 

I know more about filtering the web than most people know about what they had for breakfast this morning. I have been doing it a little while now - if there was a "perfect solution" I would know about it So lets aim for perfect, and be bloody happy with "very good".

 

End of Rant.

[JJonas]

Are these 25 incidents also taking into account times when we emailed county to let them know of an undesirable site?

[tom_newton]

What about the way websites are changing. I am now getting regular hits from google thanks to its predictive text feature and there appears to be no way to turn it off

 

There are almost certainly ways to block this behaviour at filter level. We might be able to help (even if you aren't running Guardian )

[SteveBentley]

Certainly seems that the "journalist" in question has been well and truly taken to task on his blog entry.