Well, I agree and disagree, in my school we have to either do some "All The Write Type" [stuff]. Every single day, and whenever we get those very few times of free time on the computers, my teacher uses it to "Teach" us how to use the internet, in which we already know about, for example.......
Teacher: "Ok, now then, you see the button on the top left corner, under a little thingy that says File? Thats the back button kids! Guess what it does, it takes you to the page you were recently on!!!
Students Whispering: OMG, I hate this, this guy thinks he's so special, a frikin two year old could figure this out.
Teacher: EY! No whispering, you have something to say! Say it!
Students: Erm, Uh, we were simply discusing how-
Other Student cuts in: How the back button is so useful for us!
ETC, ETC, ETC.
.....or......
When we do get free time without our teacher trying to be special, we do study ups on history subjects for about 15 minutes to 20 minutes, then we have free time to do whatever we please, go on any website, except... Chat, E-Mail, Sex-related(of course), Or any game page that has too many banners, oh yah and new grounds and stick death of course. Basically computers sucks for my school, but I agree it should be about learning, just not learning what you already know!
Actually, I was on a website giving specific instruction on how how to build a bomb, and the school did not block it,... it's a shame I have to go to these sites to amuse myself, rather than go to someplace 'safe' like pogo.com
-I'm actually here at school now,... apparantly they don't block "http://games.byond.com/" or "http://developer.byond.com" for that matter. :-/ ~Kujila | |
My school's internet policy is fairly similar. Unfortunately few teachers enforce the parts involving e-mail. Also, due to some funny wording in the policy, you aren't allowed to download any ficticious material(even the public domain stuff). A web page says "The sky is lime-green." and you've gone against the policy.(not like anyone notices or cares, though)
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My school also had BYOND blocked. But I got a particition going, and asked 100 people from my school to sign it. Of course only 4 of them knwe what BYOND was, and only 3 (inc me) still went on it! But I got it unblocked so now I can go on it :D
YIPPEE ~GokuSS4Neo~ | |
The school gave you a 515! That's not fair!
Pfffffft. If I tried to spread BYOND across my school, Airjoe = "Total nerd....AVOID AT ALL COSTS!" | |
We can't check e-mail, we can't do anything! We can't even open up IE! The teacher has to do it for us! No going to a different website without the teacher knowing!
/me always sits in the back and plays games playable in the browser. <-Airjoe-> | |
I had several images uploaded for a school project [I was going to download them in school] and I couldn't log in or view my geocities webpage.
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As bad as it may seem for some of you people, you should feel lucky that your schools have computer courses. If anyone's ever noticed, there are a lot of schools across the country which lack such luxuries (And I don't use that term lightly). I'm currently enrolled at James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland Ohio, and there are only two courses offered here concerning computers, one of which being Calculus (Rather, it uses computers, though it's not completely centered around them). The school also offers some CISCO course, but that's only open to Juniors and Seniors. By the way, this is the best rated school in the district, and it manages to pull a graduation rate of 66% (That makes for a high drop out rate, but for the other high schools in the district... let's not go there). This also helps to explain why people from this area are technically challenged. My uncle earned $50 one time from teaching a guy the proper way to start up and shut down a computer, so it all works out in the end. ;)
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Eh, at least you can use the internet at school, I'm in the new computer lab here, 28 brand new 2 ghz dell P4's. Its its own network, not hooked up to the disrict, which also means it has no internet, and the teacher is just fine with that.
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My highschool is new this year, and with a 33-mil fund package from the government, we dfinitely are not suffering of a lack of technology.
We have hundreds, or at least ONE hundred, new P4 1.24 GHZ PCs for the many varied courses, such as "Web Authoring" and "Web Design" to "Digital Works" "Intro to Programming" "Visual Basic" and C++ courses. The school also "gave" (still school property, however) Palm m515s to the entire student body (maybe around 600?) which must have cost a bundle seeing as Palm m515's cost around $249.00 new from palm.com,... On top of that, the school even went as far as distributing the full-sized fold out keyboards to the student body as well. ('round $99.99 palm.com, if I remember correctly) It makes homework A LOTTTTT more fun when your teacher "beams" you the assigment via IR port, and you pull out your keyboard and type away. Then, head into the school library, Hotsync, and print your Word, Powerpoint, or Excel documents! Also, there are no chalkboards in my school. They have the "white-boards" with the dry-erase markers. But *all* the classes (excluding PE! :-P ) have these really nice projectors wired into the ceilings that are hooked directly to the teacher's PC! The white boards themselves are souped-up with "mimio boards." They can browse the web on the white board using their "Air Mouse" (hard to use!) and keyboard. Teachers can also use the Mimio stylus to tap or draw on the screen, as you would with a mouse. If you miss, say, math for a dentist appointment or such, just e-mail the teacher and he or she will e-mail you the notes he or she wrote on the white-board (mimio can record usage of the 'electric' markers)! Iv'e yet to seen many teachers actually taking advantage of that feature, though, as they generally use nromal dry-erase markers instead of the high-tech ones,... ;) Forgive me for saying this, but school is so fun now 0.0 Some teachers get angry if they find you playing games on your palm, though, and "Dope Wars" for the Palm has been officially banned from the school :-P ~Kujila | |
A lot of the people in my school are nerds anyways, that's why I transferred over there, but when I showed BYOND to a friend today, he simply remarked, "You need to learn a REAL programming language,..."
:-/ ~Kujila | |
...that is the harshest thing I have ever heard in my life,...
Blocking IE? What sick minded people that run your school district! ^_^ (j/k ;) ) ~Kujila | |
The biggest problem we have is all of these programs that track what you do on the internet (Gator as well as all of those freaking IE search bars). Every single one of these programs cause the computers to crash or do something extremely annoying (pop-up advertisements anyone?). We constantly go into classrooms and computer labs having to remove these programs because the teachers are not watching the kids. I have very little respect for the teachers that allow this.
We also have problems with kids downloading Kazaa and downloading every music file in existence. I have personally deleted several hundred gigs of MP3 so far... In fact, when Napster was around, I can almost safely say that everyone who even used Napster downloaded an MP3 from the local high school. ...it was that bad. Last school year, we had two schools that had Kazaa running on just about every computer. This basically DoSed the internet for the entire school system. We even had to unplug T-1 lines at the central office just so that we could download a file in a reasonable amount of time (greater than 3KB/sec over a dual-T1 setup). To battle this problem, we do have a site license for a program called FoolProof. This basically restricts what a user can and can't do on the computer. This worked well at the local high school until some kid (I have other choice words I like to describe him) installed SubSeven on a new computer we hadn't locked down yet and grabbed our passwords when we installed it. Hell broke loose after that. We gave the news to the superintendent and he had a field day with the pricipal and the lab teacher of that school. Today, FoolProof is down yet again because some teacher gave one of his classes the password to the system...and...well...you know how that went. We haven't had a chance to go back and changes passwords and fix anything yet. I was there just yesterday and just about EVERY computer would come up with an illegal operation about some gamechannel.exe file and wouldn't shut down properly. Basically, it boils down to this. If you let the students do whatever they want on the computers, then they won't work properly when they have to use them for what they were intended for...resulting in many low grades. I have worked for this school system as a part-time worker for just over seven years now, and have learned to never underestimate the destruction a group of children (grades 5 and up) can do. ..can't say much for the teachers either. :-X | |
We blocked yahoo.com due to email, chat, and that annoying toolbar that EVERYONE installs.
We also blocked other webmail sites. | |
Couldn't you have just blocked all of yahoo.com and then allowed certain sites like www.yahoo.com and search.yahoo.com, which are useful?
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Is that all the computers? We have at least 1 computer per teacher, plus 4 computer labs for classes to sign up to use. Also 3 more computer labs that have classes in them. Each lab with at least 25 computers in it. Now granted some of them are slow pieces of crap. Half of them are PII's and the other half are P4(pritty much the dells your discribed).
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How can his school live with so few computers??? We have a staff of 78 and every staff has at LEAST one computer. We then have 2 labs by the library (with 39 computers, and 44 computers) , 2 labs down in the IT block (no surprise there! Each with exactly 35 computers) and then each member of staff has ANOTHER computer in the faculty lounge.
All of which are connected on a network, and they all have an internet connection, with few sites blocked, 1 of which used to be BYOND. So a quick calculation (discluding random computers in DT block which are pretty lame) my school has about 310 computers. All new this year! Well at least I know where my £8400 a year is going! ~Ease~ | |
When I left it was at the point where you simply couldn't use the internet. We had a lazy system admin who could ban you from the system for saying a bad word in an e-mail in under 20 minutes (I say bad word because we got banned for saying things that weren't even swearing), but took 3 weeks to add unblock a page after you asked him too.