The Sick Day

typingtest.com is blocked on the web filter, but facebook.com isn't - my ninth graders thought that was hilarious. Do you think you can fix it? Sorry to bother...

After staying out late the night before with, ahem, some fellow ed-techies and feeling something nasty in the back of my throat, I woke up with no voice and what felt like the flu. Not so great when you find yourself not only talking, but repeating all day. I opted to stay home, if only to stop the nasty cycle of viruses in schools. You get sick, but you come anyway and pass it on to 25 third-graders, who then pass it on to the entire school community. That is, unless, you're one of those folks at the end of the chain. Then, it probably just doesn't matter. I don't like to chance being Typhoid Mary, though.

After waking up to my usual alarm, I stay awake, because I know the e-mails and/or phone calls may start at any moment. I check in on our server, which is doing OK. E-mail is outsourced, so that's reliable. Sara, the High School tech integrator, reaches me by 10:30 with the web filter e-mail.

Of course, even when I don't touch the web filter, it can get wonky. I remote back into our server to take a look.

I'm not a huge fan of our web filter. As far as web filters go, ours is great, but in concept, the two of us don't mix. Most parents want to hear we have one of these, and our administration, fearful of the particularly litigious parents, always want the safe side. So, we have one, and I pick my battles, so my dislike for them is only conversational at Children's Prep School. Folks have yet to put our (somewhat unusual) allowance of facebook.com and my conversational dislike of web filters together. I suspect I'll hear it from the head at some point, but two and a half years in, I haven't heard a peep. And, if he says something, I know I can distract him with the endowment. Works like a charm...

I do a quick browse and see that typingtest.com is categorized as "Game Playing." I have to do this frequently because the updates on our webfilter sometimes changes categorizations of innocuous websites to categories that are blocked. I mostly chuckle at this, but teachers and students find it frustrating, especially if they could see that website the day before. I think quickly about unblocking just the domain and then think about Occam. I set the entire "Game Playing" category to Monitor instead of Block. We'll see how this goes. Even though I don't like filtering, I do have fun playing with the filter itself. It's a mean little tool, and even if I don't block everything folks think I should, it's best used when teachers think students are doing something questionable on a computer in class, but are afraid to confront the student themselves - or because the student is just too fast. I just have to do a quick search through the filter's logs, and blocked or not, the student's traffic is there.

Some students say that my system of doing things is a little creepy - like big brother. I suppose it could be if I watched the traffic scroll by all day. But I don't. I depend on the students to do somethign stupid before I actually log into this thing. And then, hopefully, I won't have to look at it again for a very long time.