Linewize for Education Blog

Digital Citizenship is currently a ‘hot topic’ in education circles in the United States, placed at #3 on the Tech Trends for 2017. At the core of the debate is the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) dating from 2000. This law demands that all schools that receive federal funding for Internet access install blocking software to filter materials that are ‘obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors’.

Some feel that this has been interpreted in a heavy-handed fashion at school and district level, to the extent that a ‘Banned Websites Day’ was held in September 2016. A statement issued by the American Association of School Librarians explained the reasoning behind the awareness-raising event: 

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In this post we look at how the U.K. is approaching 'Digital Citizenship' in schools with a particular focus on trying to prevent students from being radicalised by terrorist groups. The approach taken is particulary comprehensive with filtering and monitoring mandated in every school. 

2017 is setting itself up to be a fascinating year with lots happening in the ‘Digital Citizenship’ space. Bring Your Own Device programs are building momentum globally. Educational technology research is pointing to the benefits of embracing social media and other online tools for engaging students. Children’s use of the internet is increasing year on year and calls for developing Digital Citizenship are reaching a crescendo. As a result, governments, schools and communities are acknowledging that children need to be able to participate online safely and securely. This series of 3 blogs looks at three countries who are proactively tackling these issues – some at government level and some at the ground roots.

New Zealand: ‘From Literacy, to Fluency to Citizenship’

For teachers there's almost an unlimited number of educational websites and applications that can help in the classroom. It can be time consuming trying to find the really good ones.

As a new generation of children have smartphones from a young age it is becoming a much discussed issue for schools. In the US, the average age a child has their first mobile phone is 10, compared to 13 in 2009. This will continue to trend downwards over coming years.

BYOD and Student Safety

John Topp, Deputy Principal at Porirua College explained the issues that needed to be resolved prior to rolling out BYOD, “With our existing system we could not see what students were doing, we couldn’t easily monitor traffic on the network and we had instances of students using staff log ins on their own devices and we needed to put a stop to that.”

In addition, Porirua College felt that it had a responsibility to the community to ensure that students were using the Internet safely on campus and at home. John explains, “Our parents’ biggest concern about the proposed Chromebook roll out was that they would not know what their children were doing on the Internet at home.”

“We see Linewize as a tool for keeping reactive discussions about inappropriate usage to a minimum, preferring instead proactive discussion on how to use the internet before a situation develops. Our openness reflects real life in the digital world and prepares students instead of shielding them.” – Alex Daroux, Head of IT Operations, Te Aroha College.

Edgewize: transforming a firewall from blocker to enabler

Disillusioned with the school’s existing firewall, Head of IT Operations Alex Daroux began to search for an alternative solution better suited to a college environment. Their current firewall was designed for small businesses and struggled with the demands of a medium-sized school. With staff and students facing repeated requests to login to access the network, Alex knew that it should be easier.

The Ministry of Education recently published a number of video case studies on Halswell School and St Hilda's Collegiate School. Both Halswell and St Hilda's use Linewize services to not only manage network and content access but also use the visibility Linewize provides to enable conversations with students around good digital citizenship.

“Linewize has given us a really good tool to talk to students about digital citizenship especially if filtering hits come up.” – Fraser Malins, ICT Leader, Halswell School.

Halswell School was seriously affected by the Christchurch earthquakes and required a full rebuild on the existing site. After three years of disruption they now are enjoying a fully custom built MLE environment to support their learning. In the above video Fraser Malins talks about the educational benefits of using Linewize to maintain an open network network environment and address inappropriate use with individuals as it occurs.