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This year at BETT I had one area of particular interest which was looking at solutions for webfiltering. We have been using a very well known and popular product for a few year but having been having increasing problems with it recently overblocking (due to miscatergorising sites) and more frequent crashes. So I decided to see what had changed in the world of web filtering over the last few years…

There seems to have been a few changes in the market over the last few year, particularly with a move away from filtering based on calculated ‘scores’ to one based purely categorisation. Most products seem to now offer some form of real-time categorisation for sites not in their databases, and one or two have some other interesting features. Another area where web filtering seems to have improved over the last few years is with respect to reporting – this process seemed to be much simpler and more powerful then it was a few years ago…

For me the standout products at BETT this year for web filtering were:

BLOXX – http://www.bloxx.com/ – This uses a service they call Tru-View which categorises the website (there are details of the way this works on their website). The also offer a MediaFilter which enables teachers to submit certain YouTube videos to create a personalised YouTube collection which can then be accessed by the students – this would be a really useful service for allowing schools to give controlled access to certain YouTube videos without having to open all of youtube up to the younger students.

Lightspeed – http://www.lightspeedsystems.com/ – Lightspeed offers a wide range of services including web filtering as part of a service they call total traffic control. Their Web Access Manager operates in a similar way to the BLOXX one but also offers an installable client which will continue to monitor and filter traffic even when they are not going through out internet connection – this would be very beneficial for monitoring student access via 3G dongles etc. They also include a similar YouTube library service and a product called MyBigCampus which they are targeting as a controlled Facebook for schools – it’s not perfect but it certainly looked interesting!
Additionally their suite include a Security Manager and a Network traffic Manager which would monitor machines on the network and enable bandwidth limiting and prioritising as well as granular controls over application, computer and user network usage.

NetSweeper – http://www.netsweeper.com/ – Netsweeper mostly work with LEAs rather than individual schools but offer a similar service to the others and are used by around 1/3rd of all pupils in England (so they claim due to having several LEAs including LgfL).

Another one that has caught my eye but wasn’t at BETT (at least I didn’t see it!) was:
ScanSafe - http://www.scansafe.com/ – Recently purchased by Cisco this content filtering service is entirely cloud based and requires no hardware at all on site, and again offers us the ability to filter and monitor the boarders when they are not connected via our internet connection.

Web filtering is an essential area in schools as we all try to manage to difficult path between protecting staff and students from the less pleasant parts of the web whilst ensuring they have access to everything they need… There are a few products here that look like they may help us walk that path a little more effectively.

Anyone seen/used any of these products or anything else they want to recommend?

This is the question posed by Daniel Willingham in Chapter 7 of his excellent book “Why don’t Students Like School?”

This is a very trendy and topical question which has been making its way through schools in various guises for the last 10 years.  Willingham however takes a very different approach to most by using his background as a cognitive scientist to look at what the evidence says about ‘Learning Styles’.  It turns out that research into Learning Styles provides no consistent evidence that students learning styles have any significant impact upon student learning…

He talks about studies looking at visual and auditory learners, where groups of students where some are ‘visual learners’ and others are ‘auditory learners’ are given two lists of words to learn – one is written down and the other is read out to them…  If the theory (as presented in most school) were true we would expect the visual students to do better on the words they had read and the auditory ones to do better on those they had heard, but this turns out not to be the case.

How can this be the case?  It is certainly true (and Willingham goes in to this) that some students have better visual or auditory memories, so surely if a student has a better auditory memory then they should better remember the list of words that was read to them.  But this misses the point completely!  When we test the students recollection of the words we are not testing how they ‘sound’ (i.e. the tone of voice used etc), what we are testing is the meaning presented, the same is true for the students that read the words, they are not being tested on the visual image (the font, size etc) they are being tested on the meaning they inferred from the text.

Willingham present a very compelling case for why no credence should be paid to the Learning Styles debates in schools (and even goes on to talk about why people believe they are true – Confirmation Bias), and is also equally condemning of Gardiner’s famous theory of Multiple Intelligences.

He concludes the chapter with the following statement that should be shared with all teachers:

“If you have felt nagging guilt that you have not evaluated each of your students to assess their cognitive style, or if you think you know what their styles are and have not adjusted your teaching to them – don’t worry about it.  There is no reason to think that doing so will help…” p166

Ultimately his point is that

Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn

I am really enjoying this thought provoking book, and would highly recommend it to anyone involved in teaching (in or out of schools!)