I’ve been spending my summer break catching up on my favourite PodCast Classroom Geeks and even though the episodes I was listening to were from way back in 2009 it was interesting to note that there were discussions occurring about blocked content in schools. When I was next close to my twitter feed I noticed a number of articles come through about websites which should be white-listed on school content filters. I have to ask what exactly is content blocking teaching kids?
Granted the educational institution I work for also filters content (though the restrictions are not too bad we do have access to facebook, twitter, and YouTube). I do want to know what are we teaching kids if we don’t let them access the big bad world. I have three children and at home we do not filter the Internet. Instead we teach our children what to do instead and trust that they know how to handle it. Ms 10 certainly does a number of times she has come to us about questionable content her friends have sent her or she has stumbled across and we have the appropriate conversation and alert who we feel needs to be alerted. I don’t think we need to shelther her from it. Perhaps educational institutions need to take the cotton wool off their eyes and have a good look at their content policies. I guess the problem is there is always someone who objects and makes waves. And schools need to protect themselves from this. I guess this goes back to my earlier post Time to Pop the Bubble Wrap We need to teach the kids cyber safety.