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Educational Institutes’ rising demand for Internet Filters
- By Anup Gupta
- Published 11/21/2011
- Computers and Technology
- Unrated
We look forward to a more evolving education system with each
passing day, an education system which is transparent, flexible and
innovative. With all this said and done there are challenges which are
faced by education institute which goes beyond the normal activities.
One of the most interesting and challenging issue which we noticed was
the access to Internet. Exposure to internet is common to all the
students across the institute. The question comes is Internet can
either be used for constructive purposes like online studies, exposure
to latest information and creative ways of using knowledge to more
wasteful activities like playing online games, going to adult sites and
so on.
We discussed this with few institutes and this is what the feedback was:
"The students are exposed to Internet at the school however we have
noticed that the content accessed by them is sometimes not relevant to
their studies; playing online games, visiting adult websites is common.
This is a disadvantage of providing internet which we are not able to
control."
- Maria Fernandez, Don Bosco School
"We have regular intervals for student to access internet, however a
lot of times malware gets downloaded, adult content gets loaded. We
understand that all this may not be intentional but internet filtering
needs to be done prior to content display to students."
- Joseph Faiclough, Creative Heights
The above comments directly point towards necessity of internet
filtering/ web filtering at the institutes.The institutes allow 24 by 7
internet accesses to the students in the hope of providing an open and
learning environment. This is essential and has some disadvantages as
well. At such a junction what can come to the rescue of these
institutes is a web filtering software. There are many internet
filtering software which are available in the market and provide great
flexibility to the institutes. A web filtering software will help the
institutes in allowing only relevant data to be accessed to the
students. Few are made custom specific to education institutes only.
Hence you can have all the benefits of allowing internet access to the
students and at the same time restricting unwanted activities by the
students.
Below are few features of good internet filtering software:
- To allow to visit only the specified websites from the white list
- To view the logs of all the activities done on the internet
- Force safe search on all major search engines
- Block social networking, online games and other inappropriate content as per schedule or all the time
- To specify the allowed tie for internet access
- Restricting any harmful or malware links to open
- Block chatting, messengers from access
Hence what is going to happen with the tools for internet filtering
is you can stay assured that the content accessed is reliable and
acceptable at all levels. This not only will be helpful to the
community but as an organization will save a lot of your time and
efforts. This shall help your employees to focus on their primary
activities and improve productivity.
Author says: I have studied a lot about Web content usage and content
filtering. I highly recommend parents and schools to use Internet Filter Software to prevent kids from unwanted website access. Block Websites in the network which are not relevant or harmful for kids for the better upbringing.
