Thursday, February 15, 2007

Filtered VLogs at Schools



Jay Krieger presents a dilemma where schools often filters out videos from YouTube, Video.Google and other sites as part of Internet Safety for our children. He calls for ideas and opinions

14 comments:

grantlairdjr said...

Not just at school, many workplace and federal blocked it too.

Only way to make it work is upload into your own hosting account or use someone's website. I know it's not free but at least it wil work.

Joey Baer's website is good example, it should work just fine at many schools.

gwlj

Anonymous said...

Make sense. Due to the security reasons, many federal and state gov't blocked many informal and incommercial vlogs and blogs.

My husband and I already put our children's "CyberPatrol."

White Ghost

Barb DiGi said...

I have this similar problem about not having access to ASL vlogs if they are posted via youtube, google, etc. Last fall, I wanted to show social justice videoclip by M.J. Bienvenu as a part of educational tool but it was denied. It was not because of the clip but where it came from.

I requested my supervisor to allow staff to have this access and select appropriate viewings to show to students but of course it was declined.

Most percent of ASL vlogs come in non-hosting accounts. To me,it is a denial to ASL access for students. Wouldn't it be nice if we have a different engine that we can upload our videos to something like ASLTUBE that is moderated like deafread.com making it accessible to the school and workplace?

Jay said...

Barb Digi,

I have been browsing around and do not see much options we have other than owning a server with lots of disk space, and managed by some folks who would baby sit it. I am hoping one day, someplace like Gallaudet or some non-profit organization would offer DeafYouTube or like you said ASLTube.

Anonymous said...

That is why I create and install all videos in my own website instead of youtube or google. The cost of monthly fee for webhosting is cheaper than you think. (Believe it or not, it is much cheaper than the subscription of daily newspapers.) 1&1.com and ixwebhosting.com are highly recommended. Let us vlogging! : ) Ron, owner of savegallaudet.org and supportasl.com

Anonymous said...

Like others said, all workplace and certain governments block vlogs for safety for children and preventance of declining work production.

It's good idea to create a seperate video internet server but it may fall into the categories that YouTube and Google Videos share and all of the vlogs would, too, be blocked.

I think we need to have all educational institution to come up with some sort of universal video server that do not have any of those "censored" vlogs/video clips and have a sharing agreement with all other educational facilities to provide ASL students, deaf students, and general public access to the ASL vlogs and other related vlogs.

I forsee one or two such video internet server to be set up within a year or two and of course with growing pains to be digested, we will have our vlogs viewed without blockage or censorship.

Anonymous said...

For your job workplace safety, prevent from parents sue you or the school, etc, etc...block all and have the kids/students check out on their own risk in homes using their own computers.

Or like Ron said above, have all vlogs set up in your own personal website and we can view without the problem of being blocked.

Anonymous said...

Yes, as a, educational consultant at Horzins Academy of Maui, I do not recommend visiting DeafRead.com at all. Vlogs may be okay but there are some blogs with links leading to soft pornos. It's very difficult...some vlogs include these links to someone who subscribes to sex links... Sad, indeed. Children must be protected!

Jay said...

All,

Yeah, I figured as much -- until there is a designated host out there managed by trusted folks (Gally, DeafRead, etc.), then schools can unblock that site.

For some of you who suggested that I set up a server, well, that would only be good for my own VLogs. I was more looking at the public domain...

Thanks all.

Jared said...

with Google Video you can download the videos directly to your laptop/computer and play with them Google Video Player.

This will get around the online blocked rules for Google Video. This isn't an option for youTube since those videos can only be viewed online and cannot be downloaded.

Anonymous said...

Our school has similar experience and decided that youtube, google video, and others will be accessible for our students. We strongly believe that our students should have an access to ASL vlogs and other good piece of clips.

In return, our staff take more responsibility and monitor students closely when they surf. If they are caught surfing unacceptable clips, we take time to sit down and discuss the situation. It worked just beautifully.

We MUST expose our Deaf children with the rich vlogs we have right now. NOW not later...

Anonymous said...

I was surprised that the below tip worked for me at my school for the deaf. Seems our filter hasn't incorporated a filter for IP numbers (NOT YET!).
===============
Use IP address - This is the simplest way to bypass domain name based access restrictions. Instead of the domain name, use the direct IP address. To find the IP address use one of the free host to IP online conversion tools such as http://www.hcidata.co.uk/host2ip.htm

ie. youtube.com is http://208.65.153.242

source of tip and more tips http://www.webstuffscan.com/2006/11/23/how-to-access-blocked-websites-top-10/

Anonymous said...

corrected above link


Also...
Videoclips on Youtube, google, bliptv etc can be downloaded to your computer. This is handy for repeated viewing offline. Go to keepvid.com and paste in the youtube video url and download as .flv type. Use a free flv videoplayer (I use Riva..downloaded from download.com)

Jay said...

I believe SurfControl filters out by both the DNS name and IP addresses.

Some students figured out how to bypass SurfControl by using external web-baesd Proxy Servers, but that hole is now sealed.