The Danger of Internet Filters at Schools

If you haven't yet subscribed to Weblogg-ed, make sure you do so. Will Richardson is spot on with many of his posts about digital literacy. His latest post, Filter Fun, talks about his on going frustration with schools putting filters on internet use and the potential damage caused.

...I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is...The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.