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Instructables at school; MORE information needed.
Since publishing my last Instructable, the subject of filters and blocks has been cropping up.
Some schools, it seems, block or filter Instructables for a variety of reasons.
If you are a student or staff member in any level of education, could you let us know;
- Where you are (country, state, county etc)
- What level of establishment you are trying to use Instructables at - primary, middle, high, university
- What you are (staff, student)
- Whether you can access instructables at school
- If not, do you know why not, and where the decision to filter was made (school, county etc)?
- Are there different filters for staff vs students?
- Anything else that might be useful.
UPDATE: The site now has FaceBook logins - has this affected the filtering at your school?
Plus:
If you are a teacher, do you use the site for / at school?
If you are a student, do your teachers use the site?
Discussions
8 years ago
Bump
More data, please...
8 years ago
Not to pick on this guy, but certain avatars and other questionable pics appear on the site, which don't really help the cause.
Reply 8 years ago
That's quite poor...
L
Reply 8 years ago
Agreed - I have informed the staff.
8 years ago
You probably know the first 3 bulleted questions about me. Last I checked the site was entirely blocked at my high school (though I suspect now only certain sections like the forums are blocked.) I suspect the reviewing process is automatically done by the filters upon the first visit from a student, as the censorship on my filters is almost as bad as China.
As far as I can tell, the principal is the only person who is not affected by the filters but there are some teachers who have bypassed the filters themselves. Interestingly, ibles was categorized as "Forums", instead of "Adult" like most other filter reports.
8 years ago
Where you are (country, state, county etc): USA, South Carolina, Columbia.
What level of establishment you are trying to use Instructables at: High School.
What you are (staff, student): Student
Whether you can access instructables at school: No
If not, do you know why not, and where the decision to filter was made: Reason: Group message board/unmoderated
Are there different filters for staff vs students: No, but teachers/staff can hit a button for a form to unblock the website.
8 years ago
Depends on page contents
Dunedin, New Zealand
High School
Year 11 Student ('unofficial' network admin too)
The filter on our server will block half of a bad word, as well as the full word. So the word 'Fuchsia' is blocked because of the first letters. Brilliant system for a kindergarten, useless for researching a topic in High School.
Filter was instigated by the Board of Trustees, and they chose one that is very easy to bypass.
Teachers have the exact same filter as the students.
The main reason the site gets blocked at my school, is that some pages contain words like: hack, admin, lingerie, bypass, proxy etc...
Reply 8 years ago
...you just blocked this whole page. :D
Reply 8 years ago
Aaiiigh!!! My eyes! My eyes! What has happened?!?!? I can't see anything!!!
Reply 8 years ago
LOL
8 years ago
My own school (Suffolk, UK, Middle) allows 'ibles for staff, but for pupils it is filtered (by county) for "inappropriate content".
8 years ago
Moscow, in the Russian one.
High school, Year 10 out of 11, starting at Year 0.
Student, of cause...
Yes I can, actually anyone can access anything as long as you seem like working, or the teacher will turn the internet off. They think that filtering is undemocratic and means they don't trust the students, which is deadly for the homely family atmosphere...
8 years ago
YES, I can access Instructables at school.
Location: Alberta, Canada
School type: Private; specializes in learning disabilities
Level: I'm a student in Grade 12. My school starts as low as there's demand and goes all the way up to Grade 12.
Filtering: My school uses a Netgear filter and OpenDNS filtering. Teachers can access more sites than students (e.g. YouTube). It surprises me that they use OpenDNS because my school is so technologically incompetent (they have other things to focus on, I guess).