Donna McPartland

SLM 521

Filtering Elective #8

Filtering Pros and Cons

Pros

1. Our children should not have access to inappropriate, offensive, and dangerous material at school.

2. It is our duty as educators to protect our students from material that is harmful to them.

3. The Internet gives students access to obscene pictures, exposing them to pornography and other offensive content.

4. There are sites on the Internet that give instructions to anyone on the site, including our children, on how to make a small bomb or other weapon.

5. Students might, intentionally or accidentally, discover specific information on how to start a virus.

6. The Internet provides access to graphic sexual acts that could be viewed by students either accidentally or intentionally.

7. We don’t allow children to see movies that are inappropriate, and we don’t have harmful materials on our library shelves, so why should we expose them to material on the Internet that is known to be harmful to minors.

Cons

1. When filtering bad sites, many good and useful sites are blocked wrongly.

2. Web sites that are not harmful, but may be politically unacceptable, could be intentionally blocked.

3. By blocking access to Internet sites, we are violating our students’ rights to intellectual freedom.

4. Many chat rooms and images are still accessible and could be harmful to children even with the filtering of web sites.

5. If we filter too much, we block out good sites, and if we don’t filter enough we haven’t blocked the inappropriate material.

6. With filtering software in place, educators may be slack in their duties to screen children’s computer use and protect them from offensive and harmful material.

7. Even with filtering software in place, there is information available, to students and anyone else, relating how to get around the filtering.

My present involvement with school classrooms is primarily at the middle school level. At this level it is still the teacher’s responsibility to protect students from harmful materials on the Internet, while purposefully teaching them how to evaluate web sites for themselves.

At the middle school level, we would like the students to have some self-selection of Internet research materials. They should have search engines from which to choose, but these should come from a pre-selected list that the teacher has approved and should be age-appropriate. Hot links should be pre-selected as well, with the students having a range of sites from which to choose.