Slashdot Mirror
What Restrictions Should Student Laptops Have?
An anonymous reader writes "We're a school district in the beginning phases of a laptop program which has the eventual goal of putting a Macbook in the hands of every student from 6th to 12th grade. The students will essentially own the computers, are expected to take them home every night, and will be able to purchase the laptops for a nominal fee upon graduation.
Here's the dilemma — how much freedom do you give to students? The state mandates web filtering on all machines. However, there is some flexibility on exactly what should be filtered. Are things like Facebook and Myspace a legitimate use of a school computer? What about games, forums, or blogs, all of which could be educational, distracting or obscene? We also have the ability to monitor any machine remotely, lock the machine down at certain hours, prevent the installation of any software by the user, and prevent the use of iChat. How far do we take this?
While on one hand we need to avoid legal problems and irresponsible behavior, there's a danger of going so far to minimize liability that we make the tool nearly useless. Equally concerning is the message sent to the students. Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?"
Judging from practically every computer with a body in front of it at my local community college, these are the only 2 reasons to even have a computer.
..only partially
40% of the replies will be "do not filter anything, you Nazi!"
1/2 of those will be "Do everything in your power to circumvent the existing school board rules."
Another 30% will say "don't bother, because the kids will just go around your blockages."(thinking that all school kids are as adept as the ubergeeks here are)
You may get a very few replies about how you can actually do what your job requires.
I think you're confusing "laptop" with "girl".
There's just no way to appreciate them properly on those tiny laptop LCD screens.
No, they have to learn how the real world works. So the IT policy has to seem completely arbitrary and stupid, as it is the result of group-think.
Maybe
-enable email and web surfing, but they can only use msn for searching
-block AOL and MSN but not Yahoo instant messaging
-block accessing piratebay.org (the dns entry), but not the IP address or aliases for it
-block nntp port, but not alternate ports
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The lawyers will be drooling over this and be ready to sue on contact for any student who sees something inappropriate on myspace. Free money!!
Unfortunately this means you get the shaft as your in charge of settings. A single lawsuit could kill the whole program and your career.
Play it safe ban all search engines and most blogging and social websites. Google especially as students can google myspace proxy and get around filtering.
http://saveie6.com/
There's always some moron who makes one line statements without backing it up with any facts or proof.
Money is the root of all evil?
ROFL ... i *almost* replied without reading carefully.
If nothing else, that school will graduate many computer security experts :)
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Yeah because corporations are super smart and do the right thing all the time...
heh I beat putty YEARS ago :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
no need, looking at goatse is adequate punishment in and of itself
While still in high school I worked part time as a network admin for the school. We had just begun to incorporate a laptop program that started with the 6th graders. At time time our biggest trouble was students that bent the hell out of the wireless cards that stuck out of the side like a sore thumb. The reason that was the biggest problem was because our policy was one of educating the students about general best practices. If they came in with a trojan, adware, malware...whatever we just used ghost to set it up clean right away. The students lost all data important to them and gained in the lesson that we'd fix the computer but we're not going to hold your hand or save your data. Porn? not a problem on our network. We blocked what we expected and used a cron job to grep out any of a set of "naughty" words that came across the firewall. When any one user hit a certain threshold they were brought in for a "meeting". This was enough of a deterrent that by the end of the first month more teachers were brought in for meetings about acceptable network use than students. Even more surprising? It was an all boys school.