Internet Usage

I thought I would write about one of my experiences this year, the school switched to broadband adsl access away from wired country at the beginning of the term 3. Now we were doing around 32 Gig a month through the student proxy. Since the change over we hit 52 Gig, that is were our cap is at. And we still had a week and a bit to go to be able to get access to the new data. We do the normal thing, block all the social networking sites, try and block proxy sites through watchdog our internet filter provider. Also block is youtube. So how did the students go over the cap is such a large way.

My guess is stupidity.

Someone got up at the staff meeting and announced that we now had faster Internet access, come on, why would you do this... We have staff members at our school that would tell the students this, what will students do, they will work out a way around it and to use it. I have a cap of 10 Gig at home, and I use all of it each month. Someone suggested that it was the game sites that cause this problem, yes they do cause some of the problem, but not approx 10 Gig of flash games, there is something else that has caused this.

We keep logs of students access, however these are not easily accessible. but we do have a proxy log of traffic, websites, and traffic from users that we look at. However Monthly usage wasn't looked at, partly because its at the bottom of the page. Using this list we looked at users that were above 200 Meg for the month, I know that this is kind of low, but when you average out 1800 users it is rather a lot, 200 Meg and above is the at the top 19 users for the month. The top user reached 1.4 Gig for the month. How is this possible.

I was in the Deputy Principals office 3 times in one day because of this, as I seem to be the fountain of knowledge. It is difficult due to the fact the school does not have a adequate network use policy. It is way out of date and does not bring into account anything that it in todays schooling. I have been quoting the current network use policy since joining the school five years ago. The last update was in February 2004. We cannot do anything about these students this month, but the warning has gone out, be in the top 15-20 in August and be prepared to answer some serious questions. It cannot just be games, it has to be something else.

Most of the top users are in the ESOL department, where they spend most of there time at school. Internet usage is mainly mp3's and social networking sites. But what we need up there is education, unfortunately we do not have the resources in the first language for these students.

Other students that are in the top usage are the design students. how can this be, research, or just mucking around?

There are more questions to ask, but we will see what the month usage holds.