Do you ever get the feeling of a daily mini- withdrawal from the internet and our beloved social networking sites during those seven hours at school? I’m sure many have typed facebook.com into the address bar unintentionally at least once. Or they’ve attempted to find a good game to occupy some free time. Yet, the message is always the same: access denied.
“They have no educational value,” said Assistant Principal Mr. Canale. “Students use them in ways that get themselves in trouble by defaming reputations, antagonizing and bullying others, and even provoking people from other schools that then seek to retaliate more violently.” Canale points out that many teenagers don’t recognize the effects of posting information onto a public site. Future employers, college admissions officers, scholarship evaluators, and investigators can easily access anything we post.
Of course, we are the school’s responsibility during school hours so it is perfectly understandable that unnecessary and potentially risky situations be avoided by simply blocking sites. The school wants clean hands and we understand. However, if a person wants to insult or defame, there will always be options both in school without social networking or outside of school with the freedom to use social networks.
Social networking sites, despite our addictions to them, are not as beneficial to education as other likewise blocked sites potentially can be. Other blocked sites like YouTube , Flickr, and other pools of multimedia sources are blocked no matter what topic a desired video is about.
“Photo and video websites can be very useful tools for high school students because both help us communicate, share, and even exhibit our creations with the rest of the world. It is frustrating to be cut off from these because, even as an international school, we don’t have much access to the multimedia available on the world wide web,” said Managing Editor Simit Christian.
Photos and videos can easily become another medium teachers could use to teach a lesson. Students from across the globe would have a new means of sharing visuals that would aid in understanding of other cultures.
Most importantly, why should innocent videos and photos be blocked? There has to be a way to block only certain images while leaving potentially educational media open for viewing in school.
There is also much to be learned from the sites themselves. We live in a rapidly developing technological world, where technology skills should never be underestimated. The internet is thriving and we should know how to keep up.
“The future will require us to use YouTube and other similar sites with our careers and schooling,” said Managing Editor Sean Fisher. “And colleges and jobs can look to see how (and if) you have networked on the internet.”
And games! It seems that any site with even the word “game” in it is blocked from our use. Many seniors and juniors have free periods in addition to a lunch block, both of which could innocently be spent playing an online game. It’s a way to occupy free time, a way to relax. What’s so wrong with that?
“Well, I can see why they would be blocked because kids do go on the sites and they can be a distraction,” said reporter Kim Holder, “but, most of the time, kids aren’t even on the computers except for at lunch or during global technology so we should be trusted to have these sites unblocked.”
We may be partially influenced by a subconscious addition to social networking. We may even resent the restriction of websites on school computers because of our typical teenage desires to be independent. However, something should be reconsidered when even chess is blocked on the library computers.
