DET and School Content Filtering

CMIS: DET and School Content Filtering

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DET Central Filtering Service

The Department of Education and Training provides a level of content filtering with its basic black list service. This is a list of banned sites that have been identified as unsuitable for the education market.

There is provision for a request for sites to be added to the list or for a blocked site to be reviewed and reconsidered. This is done by emailing the DET Customer Service Centre. [CSCInbox.CSC.CO@det.wa.edu.au]

Please include the following details in your message:

Site URL and Title
Teacher's name, ID and contact details
Educational purpose for site

Filtering in Schools
Schools requiring a higher level of filtering than that provided centrally may wish to filter at school level. The educational implications of using a filtering program should be thoroughly investigated against what is sometimes seen as an easy technical solution.

Other Mechanisms for Internet Management
A number of technological options are available in each school that can be implemented at the LAN or individual user’s computer level. These can restrict access to certain areas such as chat sites and newsgroups.

Working Offline
Students can work off-line by providing access to limited information by caching material.

Log Files
Conduct random checks on log files.

Filtering Images
Image filtering has become of concern in schools since many of the major search engines have introduced an Image Search option.

This option provides a great opportunity to locate images relevant to student needs in a simple and speedy manner. Unfortunately not all images on the Net are suitable for general exhibition so strategies need to be put in place to avoid students being exposed to unwanted and unsuitable visuals.

Each search engine and directory approaches the safe-search issue in a different way. All have some sort of filtering available though none are guaranteed to be 100% successful in blocking undesirable images.

Management Strategies

Direct students to image collections that are suitable for school use.
Make use of the filtering options offered by search engines of their image search function.

See: Image Search Tools

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Filtering in schools
Filtering Images