You’re at home, searching for great tools to use on your classroom blog.  You find an absolute ripper and think ‘I’ll start this tomorrow at school when i have everything’.  You get to school, gather everything you need and begin the process.  You’re getting excited…until you’re met with the biggest hurdle teachers face when trying to integrate ICT into their classroom – Internet Restrictions.

The amount of times I’ve been able to access pages, but then the uploading or photos or files have been blocked due to the firewalls or school server restrictions have become far to existent lately!

How are we meant to effectively teach our students to use these Web 2.0 tools when the schools themselves are blocking their access?

It’s all well and good for me to create a Smilebox slideshow at home, as the program doesn’t ‘recognise’ an internet connection at school, but for a child to take ownership of their learning and make one themselves – there’s too many hurdles!

I’ve asked our techie to have a look into why Animoto, Scribd and Slideshare don’t let me upload files and Smilebox doesn’t recognise the internet connection.  These are only a fraction of fantastic tools that aren’t able to be fully utilised at school because of paranoia related to students and the internet.

This post by Kathleen Morris regarding ‘blogging’ and the Ultranet resonated with me, and I definitely agree with her.  This, in addition with all our blocked tools, really makes you wonder why we’re pushed to integrate so much ICT, when all they’re really allowing us to do is teach the kids how to use a word processing suite.

What fantastic tools are/were blocked at your school?

What did you do to overcome it?

Did you find any great alternatives?