It’s tutorial, you have a test right after lunch, and you still don’t understand what a difficult concept is from one of your classes. You then decide to go online to search for an explanation, but find that the website is blocked.
Two weeks later, you’re sitting in class, when your teacher assigns a video to be watched on YouTube, but it’s blocked. By scrambling to shift their lesson plans, the teacher now sacrifices class time that was meant to be used to educate students. Unfortunately, this is not an incident that has occurred only once or twice. Seventy-seven percent of students report that they have experienced the struggle of having videos assigned to them by teachers being blocked.
For 80 minutes a week, students are given two tutorial blocks to be able to study and get work done. There, students can do anything from watching an explanation of that one difficult math problem on their Chromebook to researching a topic for an assignment. However, with this illusion of freedom comes its own restrictions. Eighty-five percent of students who encountered a blocked website were trying to access educational websites, while 75.4% were trying to access general websites for academic purposes.
On the other hand, websites like ChatGPT are available to students, raising questions about the mechanism used to block certain websites. When given access to artificial intelligence, students seem to be trusted to not search up answers, but rather use it as a productive tool to learn and grow. However, if students are being trusted to be academically honest with the work that they produce and submit, then why aren’t they also given the trust to be able to play games on commonly used websites like Google Doodle that have no chance of posing any sort of security risk?
With social media growing and becoming a platform to be able to share information quickly with both students and parents, school clubs, organizations and administrators run accounts to promote and put a spotlight on some of the work they do. For clubs, it acts as a reminder for club meetings and recaps for students that may have missed the meeting. However, despite its significant presence at Walnut High School, the Instagram website is still blocked for students on their school accounts. This causes students who are only able to access their Chromebook at school unable to stay up-to-date with club meetings and school events. Because of this, the opportunities are not available equally between students who have phones or other devices to access Instagram and those who do not. It simply is not fair to allow some student the ability to see club meeting and event reminders that are posted during school hours, and not others.
If students are unable to do assignments because of the administrative control on their browsers, and 82.9% of students have encountered these blocked websites, it is clearly a widespread issue that must be addressed. Ω
