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.
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