Schoolwide Internet Hotspot

[jrsjrs]

Our Educational Future Requires Full Internet Accessibility

Most of our students bring their laptops to school but are not able to
connect to the Net on the benches in front of the school on a warm day.
In the library, only about three laptops can connect at any one time.
Many students who do gain access to the Internet then lock up bandwidth
by downloading music, accessing chatrooms or viewing non-educational sites,
and blacklisting websites does not seem to work.

1) We need hardware/software to enable at least 300 laptops to be connected
to the Internet at the same time wirelessly anywhere on our school grounds.
2) We need whitelist hardware/software to block out all websites except
the 50,000 websites that have been preapproved by our staff as acceptable.

Does your school already have the above two features or
do you know a company that can provide them to our school?

[annettemcd]

Do students have to enter a userid and password to access the system? If so, I would think that there is software which could record how much time and bandwidth each individual user was using. Then, instead of trying to identify all of the "bad" sites, you could 1) spell out the limitations of student use, 2) have all students sign contracts, and then 3) after the prescribed warnings, block a student's access to the wireless access.

My son's college even had a way of limiting the amount of bandwidth an individual user could access. Students who abused the system by downloading huge quantities of music and videos did not loss access, but they did end up with a very slow connection for a certain length of time.

The problem is that students think of internet access as a right, not a privilege. If you block a student entirely, he/she then claims that assignments can not be completely because of the lack of access.

Trying to block all of the blacklisted sites or limiting access to a white list is always going to be difficult. It might be better to attack the problem of limited bandwidth by blocking or slowing down just the individuals who are using too much bandwidth.

Are the computers owned by the school or by the students? If they are owned by the school, they could be policed to look for the programs (MSN and Yahoo Messengers, music download programs) which use the excessive amount of time and/or bandwidth.

[jrsjrs]

Why should a school of 2000 students, or more, have to police Internet access with userids and passwords? Students have been known to give these out to their friends and family anyway.
Why should any school have to spend time spelling out limitations to students, having students sign contracts, prescribing warnings, limiting bandwidth, then blocking or slowing down student access for a limited amount of time?

Free Internet access at a school, like driving a car, comes with responsibilities and will always be a privilege and never a right. Only when students pay for their own internet access at home do they have the right to dictate to their ISP their right to internet access.

With schoolwide free internet access, it does not matter even if the house down the block is also accessing their router - if the students, or the neighbour down the block, wants to do extra school work after class that is okay!

Websites are blacklisted by putting software on the laptop being used. Consequently, if students are using their own computers in school then this software would obviously not be installed on their own laptop, and blacklisting is therefore impossible. Blacklisting is not very effective anyway, because it relies on word recognition, which can easily be overcome simply by slight misspellings.

The whole point to the 2-point configuration mentioned in the original posting is that the Internet is a fantastic LIBRARY of information and should be accessible free to anyone in school. Everyone should recognize that, just as a school library does not stock books on pornography, how to make bombs, Al-Qaeda propaganda etc.., the ability to access such material from websites on school property is at best inappropriate and at worst outrageous.

The criteria that should be applied to school Internet hotspots are -
1) Internet access in a school should be free and unrestricted, and should not take up any extra teacher time to police, monitor, restrict access etc...
2) Internet access in a school should enable the entire student body to access the internet at the same time.
3) Internet access in a school should only allow access to websites preapproved by the teachers, adminstrators and the taxpaying parents.
If anyone anywhere has such a system, please let me know. Thanks

[Chocolate_New_Orleans]

and now you know why having internet for the students is a completely moronic idea and an extremely wasteful use of resources.

Why do the students need unlimited access, or access at all? It sounds like your school wanted to be a very progressive school and trusted that the kids would follow the rules. :rolleyes:


Now the problem is, your school has opened up a pandora's box and can't fix the problem. If you try and take away the internet now, both students and parents will complain that you are violating their rights. And everyone know how admin loves to bend over backwards for complaining parents. They are simply going to pass down, the responsibility of policing the internet to the teachers so they (the admin) won't have to listen to parents whine.


Sounds like you need a better computer person. I can't access any file sharing sites, myspace, x-rated, "rated-R" websites at all. I have tried to do a proxy before and those are blocked to. Heck, I've even gone to babelfish.com, entered a blocked website in the translate space, and it didn't work.