15 No overrides and other Responses:
I am also on the tech coordinators listserv for Ohio. they have been
wrestling with this very issue lately. I find it disturbing on
several
levels. One, most of these IT folks have no education background and
they
are making decisions for educators. 2. Many of them have no clue
about
the right to read or right to information or first amendment rights.
3.
It takes the responsiblility away from the professional.
I am thinking that a strong teachers union needs to get involved with
this
but I am afraid that the OEA may be more afraid of publicity than in
educators right to freedom.
The LMS at each campus has an override password. We also take requests
from staff and send to the central technology office for them to
evaluate and unblock for longer usage. A suggestion is that if they are
so concerned that they could issue an override password to the LMS but
require the LMS to keep a log of their overrides to turn in. That
protects everyone and serves as documentation of true informational
needs.
We just had the same argument, except it was over bandwidth.á The
filter, in our district, is controlled by the Media Specialists in our
district.á We argue that we have been trained, and we don't want a
technician to determine content for the student population.
At a small school, I was in charge of it all.
Here, no one has override capabilities except the district office.
Teachers sorely need these.
I hate to tell you this but in our District there are no overrides
without the permission of a committee that meets quarterly!! This is
something new that just happened the last half of the last school year.
We have tried fighting it and have gotten no where. The other problem
is that a lot of sites are blocked even when requested. The reason:
according to the district's attorney there are other good open sites
available that can be used instead! This guy has no idea what he is
talking about! We use WebSense in this district. There is only one
level of restriction.
A friend of mine is the librarian in nearby district and she has none
of these problems. At her school there are three levels: one for
students, one for educators and one for the IT department. She can have
sites unblocked for periods of time or forever. None of this is
possible here with the exception a simple unblock.
If there is anything inappropriate on any page in a web site, the site
is automatically blocked and will NOT be unblocked by the committee. We
do not have student email even though we have asked for it. This,
however, may be coming before the end of the school year- no guarantee
though. We just this past year at the end of the school year given
access to our school email at home. I, however, cannot access any of my
personal folders saved in Outlook. It is, however, much better than
last year for email access.
Teachers (and myself included) have gone outside the district to set-up
websites. I have made sure to not include anything on my site that
links back to the school directly with the exception of my email
address, and that will change in the next week or so. The feeling is if
you have anything that mentions the school, then the IT department or
the District can take control of your site and even force it to close if
they find something they feel is offensive. This year we can read most
educational wikis and blogs- not forums or boards, but we have
difficulty accessing sites where you create a blog or wiki. As I said,
some things are better, but others are much tighter and worse. Its like
the IT department went to a meeting this summer and learned something
terrible, but won't tell us what it is! If we knew why, it might make
things more palatable at least.
We use 8e6, and as the librarian, I am allowed to override the
block. We are the ones with Master's Degrees in Information Science
who
are trained to evaluate and select information f
or students. Who else
is more qualified to determine whether sites should be blocked, and
how
can we look at a blocked site to figure out whether the block should
be
removed? (I know you already know all this, but this is the argument
I
used with my powers-that-be, and it worked.) To the best of my
knowledge, no one else in my building has the override capability,
including the computer room monitor, our SRO, or our administrators!
We can not override ours. Even amazon.com is blocked here.
Anne Coughlin
Revere High School Library
3420 Everett Rd
Richfield OH 44286
330-523-3213
acoughli@revere.k12.oh.us
http://www.revere.k12.oh.us/school_pages.aspx?schoolid=1&deptID=70
**When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.
Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer**
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