Thunder

Today I am at the Apple RTC event in Southampton, we are being hosted by Wildern School. The school blocks YouTube and have decided that rather than educating their students in the appropriate way to use the site, they would build their own equivalent. They appear to be putting in a lot of time, effort and money into building their video repository, when the solution is already out there. If you are interested in being part of this project you can contact t.dalton@wildern.hants.sch.uk.

Yet again, another education establishment that believes that the best way to deal with a potential issue is to block it as opposed to educate.  YouTube has a tremendous amount of videos that can support learning, we need to find a way to get around the block mentality and move towards the educate and monitor philosophy.  I was going to insert a video but as I said YouTube is blocked, if I remember later I will add one.

The session after this had some students from Sandwell discussing a media summer school they had been involved in, right at the end the student said that she would put her final movie on YouTube, that says it all for me!

Today I was down in Norwich giving a talk on the use of web 2.0 applications for learning. On arrival at the John Innes Centre I sparked up firefox to check what sites I would be able to use, and what sites I would have to use screen shots for.

To my surprise my own blog was blocked, see image, it looks like my excessive use of the word ‘game’ lead to a high DDR score Why do educationalists still treat games as ‘bad things’?

After getting over this shock, it wasn’t a surprise to find that You Tube, Flickr and Second Life were also blocked. I was at the time sitting next to the Securus stand and I noticed an article about proxy bypass websites and it gave me an idea…. I typed ’school unblocker’ into Google and tried the first website - it didn’t work, not to be put off I tried the next site and it worked. I was now able to view the sites previously blocked. I did inform Paul from Norfolk CC about this and he said he would have that site blocked at the end of the day.

Anyway, I wonder how many other people can not see my blog at the moment due to its high DDR score. Leave me a comment if your filter now blocks my blog