David Bowles wrote:
It seems the standard solution in most schools is to block access to the offending student's network account. But of course this is usually completely counter-productive, given the bored student is left with nothing better to do but disrupt everyone else's work (why are some ICT coordinators devoid of any common sense?)! I've known many desperate subject teachers let said disruptive pupil use their own staff account out of pure desperation, which of course allows them read / write access to all sorts of confidential information!!!
Now why hasn't someone come up with a simple way of disabling Internet access to an individual student's PC or group of student PCs for a fixed period of say the rest of the lesson? ...with access to a specified (approved) web-site easily enabled by the teacher.
Hi David, You might want to consider looking at CensorNet from Adelix. Their website is http://www.censornet.com. It is a GPL Linux distribution (based on Debian) that uses Apache, Squid, Dan's Guardian etc. to provide a filtering router, bridge or proxy server. It supports various permutations of filtering - by client machine, user, "whitelist only", etc etc. and the logging facilities are useful too. At my school, teachers request internet access when they book an IT room. My technicians set the day's schedule up for each of the rooms in the morning, and CensorNet switches access on and off for each room as the day goes on. (It is possible to do scheduling for an individual user and machine too - for example we suspend internet access for pupils who have been trying to download something dodgy. This still leaves them able to access the internal network and, in theory, work!)
So how might this work in practice? Well in most schools the only person in the ICT suite who doesn't have exclusive access to a PC logged onto their own account is the teacher. So what's needed is a facility whereby a teacher can commandeer a student's PC for a few seconds for the purpose of setting up or releasing an Internet block.
Now when a student needs access to the Internet maybe a 'Password' prompt could pop up when they enter a URL or click on a site that's not been pre-approved. Perhaps this prompt might include a unique access number the busy teacher can cross-check against a printed table of pin-codes they keep in their pocket. Furthermore, different pin codes might allow the student or a groups of students different levels or time lengths of access to the Internet.
I know another school who combine this sort of feature with a CensorNet proxy server to allow teacher's to control the internet access state themselves. A list of passwords for each period of the day is automatically generated and made available to staff. The pupil's user profiles are set to a null proxy server by default. If a teacher wants pupils to access the internet during the lesson, they give the password out. Pupils then run a little script from an icon on the Start menu. This prompts them for the password and, if correct, imports a registry key with the CensorNet proxy settings. Cheers, Tony Whitmore