Posted on 12/17/2007 11:41:53 AM PST by twntaipan
Last week, a student at Big Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania was given detention for using Firefox on a school computer. Quoted below is the key explanation from the official detention writeup:
Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a better browser and he wasnt doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.
Im sure whether I should laugh or cry. It says so much about the state of technical education, respect for authority, what passes for civil disobedience andof coursethe all-consuming corporate hegemony of Microsoft. We live in a strange world.
Once again, hat tip to my buddy Lizard for the heads up.
This sums it up for my school as well. They can't install their own programs. No one knows where they came from and if the teacher isn't familiar with it, he/she can't judge if it is harmless or not.
“Sonny, you get rid of the program right now!”
“We can’t spy on you or use our fancy subliminal messages unless you’re browsing with IE.”
Ah... the government USED to make us use IE. :) I use it at work as do many people. We just can’t put certain add ons in it, but it’s a “class III” software meaning that it has to be approved by our IA folks.
the student should have closed the browser and then gone to the administration to tell them the teacher is a moron.
Waste of time. The administration of the average public school consists of morons, and on the off chance they weren't the teacher's union would prevent them from taking any action.
The graphics displayed on firefox do not look well. If I switch to IE, they look great.
Anyone know how to fix this?
Where I was we gave everybody local admin rights. But then the machines were re-imaged over the network between classes.
If Hotmail supports POP and SMTP (Yahoo Mail does), you might want to try Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client. It’s available for free at the Firefox site.
That seems like a good way to go, actually.
Good point. I'm already waiting for when my kids come to school with their first report written on a Mac in .pages or .odf format.
By default, yes you can. But a competent sysadmin in a school especially, should set kids up as user-level with NO s/w install privvys.
Firefox may have shrunk large photos to fit in the window.
Me too, at least for issues where my mom would agree with me. But apparently they caught on.
2) The teacher in question didnt have a clue what Firefox was, even though computers (and internet browsing) are apparently being used as a learning tool in thier class.
In most public schools the teachers don't have a clue about any of the subjects they teach.
Sort of a modern version of self-flagellation? I used to do it because I needed to for the speed. I'm not going back there.
I got a LOT of three-day vacations using that technique :-)
I was having computer problems and the Director of IT came to look at my box and noticed that I was using Firefox instead of IE. He gave me a look like I had just risen a few notches in his esteem. Maybe he didn’t expect a corporate officer to have that much good sense.
The IT dept. at my son’s,now college junior, high school hated his computer class because he and a couple of other kids could figure out system problems and get the network back to running correctly before the ink had dried on the IT work order.
Sort of a modern version of self-flagellation?
____________
Exactly.
Kids really shouldn’t be installing software on school computers.
“”Failure to serve a Saturday morning detention results in a three day in school suspension”.”
The logic of that fails me.
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