Links for this episode:

Chinese International School of Hong Kong

World Scratch Day site

Having worked in schools where the network Nazis are out to block absolutely everything and anything that might have even the slightest hint of pornography, bad language, or any other form of anti-social content on it, in the name of bottom covering, let me tell you it makes for an unhappy and quite frustrated teaching community. By all means filter out the really bad and blatantly unacceptable sites. No one would argue with this. The issue is and will always remain, in an era where around 7.3 million websites are created each day (source Berkley), it is going to be one very busy “network guy” who diligently evaluates these sites for appropriateness to kids! Faced with this daunting task, most network techs do the simple thing and set filters to block words/domains etc. This inevitably leads to the common issue of all sites with “sex” in them being blocked, thus making the personal development teacher trying to do a sex-ed lesson quite angry. Not to mention the plight of the poor biology teacher trying to teach sexual verses asexual reproduction.

Speaking as someone who set up and ran a 1:1 Laptop programme for over 800 kids in 1998, I have to say that I did see my fair share of unacceptable content on kids laptops in over 7 years of setting up and running the programme. The thing that might surprise and give many of you food for thought was that 90% of it did not come in via our internet connection!

As an independent school with an international population of students, our kids seemed to have access to a host of content from friends that were only too ready to share it with them. You can imagine the kudos of a 16 year old boy showing his peer group some content to make their hair curl! Our Malaysian and Chinese kids seemed to feel that this was a good way of being cool in their peer group. These kids were clever too. A few were silly enough to bring it in on a USB thumb drive that would be shared around but the really clever ones would have it encrypted on their laptop. As we had a blanket rule of no encrypted files on their computers, this would be immediately suspicious. Sometimes we did have issues with parents supporting us in demanding that the files be unencrpted in front of an adult but by and large our kids did get the message and I think that the level of sharing was small. In fact the kids used to regularly tell me that the level at our 1:1 school was a lot less than at other schools that were less tech-aware and allowed kids to bring in USB drives, Optical media and mobile phones unchecked.

This is a problem that a few schools are dealing with now as you can see by this post on Disruptive Student Owned Technology by an Australian educator. In short, rather than kids being able to bring along “any” USB drive, they have to buy and bring the school-badged one that is purely for school and can be searched at any time by any teacher.

I am very interested to know if your school has a policy on the media that kids can bring to school and your right to search devices such as their mobiles, USBs, iPods etc.

Photo: Blocked http://www.flickr.com/photos/za3tooor/65911648/

I just want to pick up on one point. David and Jeff have both worked for what I would say are fairly dynamic, progressive international schools in Asia and the middle east and their network of contacts is predominantly from this style of international school. I work in Hong Kong with a range of schools including the larger internationals like the one that David was formerly from. I also work with some internationals that are very different to this.

Quite a few of these international schools are not the dynamic “Switched on to IT” style of school that seemed to be portrayed as the norm in the last episode. My reason for saying this is when the backroom conversation turned to how a teacher who is really enthused about the use of ICT to further 21st Century Learning in his or her classroom might get a slightly reluctant senior administrator to see the benefit, the comment eventually came from Andy Torris that maybe it is easier to move to a school that does “get it”. Andy went on to say how he was very keen to attract teachers that are switched on to ICT for learning.

Whilst I have to say that this is good advice and ultimately the best thing for a teacher to do, it is anything but easy to do in a lot of cases. I constantly hear stories of teachers trying to use ICT tools and either not getting the necessary support or having so many barriers to jump put in place that they become disillusioned. I am currently working with a teacher passionate about using a document camera in his school and not being able to convince the Senior Administration of the benefit in spite of demonstrating excellent classroom practice with the tool. The teacher has finally bit the bullet and decided to purchase it himself. This is in a school that prides itself as being very technologically advanced.

There are a number of schools that I have visited that pride themselves on being very forward thinking when it comes to ICT but when you look more closely, it is about every kid leaving with high competencies in Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Databases. The use of ICT for learning in core subjects is almost non-existent.

So, to clarify what I was trying to say in the back channel, I wholeheartedly agree that if a teacher finds themselves hitting their heads against a brick wall in trying to get Senior Admin to see the value in using ICT to support lifelong learning and connectedness in their students, one of the options open to them would be to find a more supportive school. Sometimes, however, due to lots of factors including financial, family responsibility, promotional opportunities etc, this can be hard to do.

One thing that is out there for teachers like this that can feel frustrated is a supportive, sharing and open online community.

I don’t know what I would do without this online community!