(TNS) -- A quick search of Maryland's Frederick County Public Schools Twitter account reveals that for weeks, students have groused about a block to SoundCloud, an online service that allows users to upload their own tunes and listen to those of others.
Students’ anger about this is palpable, even from behind a computer screen, and a number of the tweets include more colorful language.
A few of the tamer complaints:
- From @Ganjalez_: “yall gonna pay the phone bill for having to use data for soundcloud?”
- @dorothylyn_: “if you keep blocking everything nobody’s gonna come to school.”
- @NikksCallmeDan: “thanks for blocking soundcloud NICE.”
Frederick County Public Schools is under a three-year contract with Lightspeed Systems, a content-filtering company that censors in a multitiered approach, Root said. The filter services and equipment cost $140,000 and keep the school system compliant with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act.
Typically, Lightspeed monitors which websites are inappropriate, but school staff can direct it to either whitelist or blacklist websites.
The obvious categories are blocked, Root said, including pornography and violence. Lightspeed actually filters out search results too, so even a Google search for something explicit would yield only the appropriate content. The same goes for advertisements or individual images on certain websites, Root said.
With its coding, Lightspeed can identify inappropriate images, and while a website may load, the picture in question will appear as an empty box.
Students are barred from most social media, except Twitter, which Root said the school system maintains to communicate with the public. Security shorteners, or services that condense URLs, are also sometimes blocked, Root said. In addition, websites based in certain countries are not allowed.
“Anything from Nigeria, for example, we know that 99.9 percent of the time it will be a phishing attempt or a virus,” Root said.
Teachers have limited purview to override the block. YouTube, for example, is not permitted for students’ use, but for educational purposes, a teacher could enter his or her password to unblock and show the class a video. If a teacher were discussing with a class an article about the war in Afghanistan, which Lightspeed would deem too violent, the teacher could unblock the site for a class discussion.
But teachers couldn’t peruse porn on their school computers, Root said.
Lightspeed certainly isn’t perfect. In a recent update, Lightspeed decided Wikipedia wasn’t appropriate. So, even though the base website could be accessed, Root said, when students went to research certain subjects, they were shut out. The school system elected to whitelist Wikipedia across the board.
In the coming year, the school system will consider a pilot program that gives teachers greater individual control and allows for near real-time monitoring of student computer activities, Root said.
For all the enraged students, FCPS staff members say they’re listening. Schools spokesman Michael Doerrer said that staff reviews every tweet and Facebook comment directed at the school system, and forwards the feedback to either the respective school or department. Staff will answer every question, unless that question contains profanity, Doerrer said. In this case, the comments about SoundCloud were directed to Root, Doerrer said.
©2015 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
