My Brain Hurts

Where do we set the balance between protecting students from the evils of the Internet and the disruption blocked websites can cause to a lesson? As we know most blocking system overblocks and even if a teacher checks prior to a lesson there can still be issues. One high school I know of has removed all blocking from their system citing the time wasted constantly unblocking sites and the educational time lost through trying to access a blocked site as more important than the so called benefits of protective blocking.

My school is undergoing a period of IT renewal so as part of that process we distributed a survey to staff and students to gauge their opinions on what we now do and what they would like to do. The number one complaint from both groups was blocked websites. As one student put it to me “I am a responsible student, I don’t want to visit time wasting sites, I want to use the Internet to assist my education so why are sites I need to get to blocked?”

Three months into the trial the school I mentioned above is relishing in their new found educational freedom. Perhaps a lead that more should follow.

Education rather than regulation, deal with the transgressors rather than pronounce everyone guilty from the start.

Many are of the opinion that YouTube is just bunch of adolescents putting up goofy videos of themselves doing stupid things, well it does has that but it has a lot of valuable educational resources as well. One example if social history recorded by ordinary people. Take any newsworthy event that you plan to cover with your class and there will probably be something there, an example of that is the numerous Tsunami videos. Many are poor quality taken with phones but they are graphic portrayals of human reactions to this event, the images and recorded voices give an interesting insight into what it was like to actually be there.

Obviously viewing live in class is the first option but many narrow minded people in power block YouTube from School network use. However all is not lost, there are a few twists along the way but it’s a fairly simple process to download these files so you can use them with your classs. A Google search on “download from YouTube” will produce many options. My favoutites are these two:

Vixy (http://vixy.net) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open vixy.net and copy the URL into the required space. Select one of the five target video formats available and away you go.

TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open TechCrunch and copy the URL into the required space and away you go. The file is downloaded in the original flv format use by YouTube. You can view the file with a player such as VLC but I prefer to convert it to an mpeg using iSquint (http://www.isquint.org). This process does have an extra step but I think the final result is a better quality file.