Inappropriate Use of Digit Media

We are a 1-to-1 district K-12. All students in grades 3-12 have their own laptop. At the middle school and high school levels we have Go Guardian which allows teachers to track students and to limit what they can access online. Unfortunately we don't have anything like this for the elementary students. We have had many instances of third, fourth and fifth graders accessing inappropriate content, (searching for 'stripe clubs' lol), setting up accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, and using their devices to bully each other. They don't realize until it's too late that we can easily access their histories and revisions. It's disappointing how often we have to deal with situations like this. And these are the ones we know about...

Even with the filters and the Go Guardian and Social Sentinel sites, we have too many students accessing and participating on inappropriate sites.  I started today warning students that we have discovered that they have been on sites not approved or appropriate for school.  There absolutely needs to be a a "discovery" of how to allow access to appropriate sites while fully filtering inapropriate sites.  Students continually find ways to get around them.

We had a seventh grade reading a serious book with "mature themes" that was very appropriate for student at upper-level classes in high school. Unfortunately, he bookmarked racy passages and passed the book around, turning it from great literature to soft porn.

We didn't ban books.

I couldn't agree with your comments more!  Students are smart!  They always figure out how to get around something.  What I'd like to add is how amazing it would be for each teacher to block or allow certain sites.  For example, I teach Child Development.  We're developing activities and lesson for young children all of the time and Pinterest is a fantastic resource for these.  However, it is blocked at many schools because students are so unproductive in many classes when they do have access.  While not inappropriate per se, they don't really need Pinterest say for Math class, but it would be a fantastic resource for their Child Development course.

It is so important for schools to have some type of filter on the technology that any student uses. There are so many instances of students either purposefully or inadvertently viewing inappropriate content. It is our duty as educators to do everything possible to prevent this.