Internet Safety

This is a big issue for educators, students and parents. As Scot Aldred suggests in his blog postings (march 2009) many public schools have gone into overkill and students are restricted in what they can access. Unfortunately this issue is also common in the private schooling sector. I recently attended prac at a private school and students were not able to access sport websites due to their advertising content. These were Health and Physical Education students doing research for their school assignment. It was a complete waste of classroom and computer time as they were given access to very few websites.
Scot also mentioned the release of the Apple iphone 3gs (June 2009) and I happen to agree, this is a marvleous piece of technology but the education system needs to catch up to this little piece of technology. I purchased the iphone in order to download and watch university lectures. Unfortunately the lectures are not saved in the correct format and I am unable to even view them on the iphone. I found this to be very dissappointing and I am sure there would be many students througout the education system that would be dissappointed to have this new technology only to discover their schooling instution is not able to support such technology.
I have used my iphone during lectures to quickly access powerpoints and other significant pieces of information. One lecturer was very pleased to be able to confirm via my iphone that the set of powerpoints we we currently viewing were actually available on Blackboard.
So technology certainly has a place in the classroom, we just need to find the middle ground where everyone has access and the institutions can support the technology. Oh and the teachers aren't afraid to give it a go.