I go to Burbank high school in the S.A.I.S.D. school district and usally our teacher gives us free time to do what we want on the internet like play games or other things i reasently discoved sites that are blocked for weird reasons:
1. Horoscopes(incuding yahoo)- Folklore
2. Game websites(even kiddie websites)- Games
3. Civil War- Brutality or Cultural Bias
4. Yahoo Pictures- Pictures
5. Google Pictures- Pictures
6. Photo bucket- Photo sharing
and the list goes on. I understand school districts for blocking websites that have graphic pictures or games, but some websites they block are relitivly harmless and they block the entier page that means all pics too. Some pictuers are essential for school work as well.And thats why some webpage programmers help others by creating Proxy websites that bypass the schools security, if it wasn’t for school districts blocking websites for dumb reasons then ther will be no proxy pages.
- student that wants to know why
yes i know how annoying is that but there is this one website that isnt blocked
Actually, sounds like the students can’t take responsibility for regulating the amount of stuff they look at during a regular school day, so the administration has to do it for you. Who is really dumb here? The student who is easily sidetracked or the administrator trying to get you to learn something?
they’re usually blocked because someone found a way to screw things up.
For example, boys in my class used to look up porn with google images, which perhaps explains why it’s now blocked.
Plus, photobucket sometimes contains graphic material too, so that’s probably why its blocked.
Games websites are blocked because the school board thinks it’ll “disrupt your education”..which i can somewhat understand.
However, I totally agree with where you’re coming from, they are starting to take things a little too far with the civil war stuff. That’s dumb, it was a part of history..and it’s in our history books anyway. And I don’t really see any harm in horoscopes either..but whatever floats their boat I suppose.
Since it seems that you can’t correctly spell (feel) or (teacher) etc. Perhaps you should rethink WHO is dumb!!!
Sometimes websites that shouldn’t be blocked are blocked just because of words that are filtered. Most of the time, the teacher can just call the tech that manages this to remove it. Since the web is a massive place, most firewalls just have word filters and sometimes good websites do get blocked. There really isn’t anything you can do about this except have them unblock this.
Also, proxies were not made originally for school districts blocking websites, lol, it just happens that people have begun to use them for this purpose.
Some of the websites you mention are time wasters or are websites you must submit information to that might not be school related. They could also be huge bandwidth wasters as well.
If you want to know how exactly why those websites are blocked I’d suggest contacting your tech of the district and find out why those might be blocked.
Also, computers do not know when teachers are giving you freetime, so it’s not like they are going to shut down the firewall just for your class for that time. Students will go off track during times they should be doing a report so this is why they will block sometimes also.
You might wanna check this link also: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200…
“Schools are cracking down on access to social networking sites like MySpace in an attempt to make time spent in a computer lab profitable (sending “I <3 u!” messages to friends who you’ll see in another hour is not generally considered a good use of school resources). The latest district to try this is Libertyville, Illinois, which has gone the extra mile by telling students that illicit material posted on such sites can and will be used against them.”http://news.com.com/Kids+outsmart+Web+fi…
Web proxies are almost as old as the Internet itself as a means to route Web traffic through an anonymous domain name or circumvent content-filters, and they’ve long been the territory of corporate networks and the tech savvy seeking privacy. Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering technology providers.
Proxies are just one of many tricks that kids use to break locks put on forbidden material–a pursuit of almost any young generation. As more schools place tight controls on PCs to stop kids from file-sharing, instant messaging, social networking or looking at undesirable material online, the kids are getting more clever, tech experts say.