School Computer Security

One of my biggest frustrations while teaching in Central Florida over the past few years was the students' inaccessibility to school computers. Our School was woefully short of units upon which they might work. Also, although the county and school tech support staff would have liked to believe that the few computers available to the students were impenetrable regarding safeguards and security measures in place, the kids absolutely had the jump on the staff. Although web-filtering was set, access to usb drives was limited and controlled, and restrictions to the wifi network were in place, students were able to use the system as they saw fit.

Being an English Language Arts class, we would often visit the school media center to gather information, either from the hard-copy materials to be found there, or from the Internet. We were reading, To Kill a Mockingbird, so we were researching race relations in the 1920's and 1930's. The students were asked to search for information about segregation, Jim Crow Laws, and the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, much of the information the students needed to access was "blocked" by web filtering. The blocked information was not very difficult to access. All the kids needed to do was repeatedly attempt to log onto the web site. After the fourth or fifth try, the web filter would fail, and the students would be granted access to the forbidden site!

One of the ways that the school media specialists tried to avoid the upload of malware onto the school network was to disable the USB ports on the library computers. Unfortunately, the students would be required to pay twenty-cents-per-page to print any of their work, so it became necessary to enable the USB ports, so the kids might save their work onto their own or my flash, thumb drive.

Restrictions to the wifi network were the most laughable. Apparently, the system was initially set up to handle a load of six-hundred users. Needless to say, a school full of ipod touches and iphones exceeded that number of users within minutes. Then the system administrators set up complex methods of signing onto the network. I needed my tech support person to authorize the first laptop I purchased, which was a Gateway. She did not want to divulge the passwords to me! Later, I saved up to purchase a MacBook, as I am more comfortable working with Macs. I called the same tech support individual, and was told that our wifi did not support Macs.?????????????? Two hours later, I was recounting my wifi woes to one of my former students. He promptly grabbed by laptop and had me online in ten minutes. I gladly wrote him a pass to his next class!!