Jon’s Network

Educators struggle with AUP enforcement

But a movement growing in schools today says taking away a student’s access to technology is akin to denying that student valuable learning opportunities–and so many school leaders are now searching for better alternatives.

As opposed to banning a kid from the internet and forcing teachers to create new lessons for them that [...]

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In this podcast, you’ll learn that URL filters are inadequate management tools when the goal is the teach kids to use the internet safely and responsibly. First, Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use explains that a comprehensive approach to student internet use is necessary. The approach must include [...]

 

 School Internet Safety with Nancy Willard and Ken Brown [39:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Christopher Hoff opines that content monitoring and protection (CMP) is a feature rather than a market justifying it’s own device in the network. Evidence of the fact can be seen as larger vendors swallow up CMP vendors to add to their feature set. He mentions that Websense acquired Port Authority and McAfee acquired [...]

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One concern some school district administrators have when considering Vericept is that they will end up with more sensitive exposure to the media and public since there is now a better record of network abuse.  This is assuming that the database would be public information.  I guess it depends on your State’s interpretion, but if [...]

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Nancy Willard, a lawyer in the education and computer law fields, has published an analysis (pdf download) today of the Julie Amero case after reviewing all available data, including the police reports.  She also discusses the map of the classroom.

Here is a tasty morsel:

Let’s be perfectly clear about this: The school district contacted the [...]

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Anne Marie Chaker of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article (subscription required) about schools trying to be proactive about the cyberbullying problem.  Schools are writing new policies prohibiting harrassment and bullying using electronic media,  but many are concerned that they don’t have a right to intervene in situations that occur off-campus.  Others are leaving [...]

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Plain-jane URL filters are no longer suitable as tools to enforce network acceptable use policies. (Were they ever?)  They are based on a list, and no matter how many college kids the web filtering companies pay to categorize all the sites on the internet, those lists will always be incomplete.  Using web proxies, end-users can [...]

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Many IT departments are concerned about end-user use of SSL web proxies to bypass their URL filters.  Most filters can’t see inside the SSL session, so they ignore it.  This renders the filter and the company policy completely useless.  You need a way to control use of these proxies to even think that you can [...]

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