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DTC have purchased some laptops for students in the 6th form.

I am keen that students access the internet using these laptops but my network manager is less keen for "security reasons".

I would be interested to know what colleagues in laptop schools or schools where students are provided with laptops do about this - specifically any examples of policy documents/user agreements would be most welcome to stop me having to reinvent the wheel as it were.

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Hi Andy,

Where will the laptops be used? Inside or outside of school?

Both - students will loan them from the College for the duration of their advanced courses

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Hi Andy,

Where will the laptops be used? Inside or outside of school?

Both - students will loan them from the College for the duration of their advanced courses

Hi,

What sort of 'security reasons' has the network manager told you about? I know off lots of schools which loan laptops to students and allow the use of Internet. Although from an IT Technician point of view I can see his concerns.

How do you plan to allow Internet access to the students at home? Will the student be allowed to use there own broadband etc? What if the pupil does not have Internet access at home will you be providing an ISP for them with dialup access - What about the costs?

Within school there is 2 options:

Wired or Wireless - both having there pro's & con's. Do use have a wireless network in place at all now?

With wired - Do you have available network points available in the area's needed?

Network cabling and Wireless networking is a very expensive job :(

You also have the problem outside of school with regarding controlling what the the pupils are accessing, more money for filtering etc.

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Hi Andy,

Where will the laptops be used? Inside or outside of school?

Both - students will loan them from the College for the duration of their advanced courses

Hi,

What sort of 'security reasons' has the network manager told you about? I know off lots of schools which loan laptops to students and allow the use of Internet. Although from an IT Technician point of view I can see his concerns.

How do you plan to allow Internet access to the students at home? Will the student be allowed to use there own broadband etc? What if the pupil does not have Internet access at home will you be providing an ISP for them with dialup access - What about the costs?

Within school there is 2 options:

Wired or Wireless - both having there pro's & con's. Do use have a wireless network in place at all now?

With wired - Do you have available network points available in the area's needed?

Network cabling and Wireless networking is a very expensive job :huh:

You also have the problem outside of school with regarding controlling what the the pupils are accessing, more money for filtering etc.

Students will be using their own internet connexions.

The security issues centre mainly around connecting to the internet at home and then connecting to the College network during the day.

We are working on a user agreement document which hopefully allay Network Man's fears.

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Technical security issues are one aspect of the problems that educational institutions have to face. Copyright issues regarding the materials to which students have access are another aspect.

The term "communication to the public" right appears in a European Union Directive (2001), which was implemented in the UK under the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations (2003): http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm

These regulations govern copyright works that are made accessible via the Internet. Essentially, this means that copyright law in the context of online learning has been tightened up, whereby only the copyright owner has the right to authorise the electronic transmission of the copyright owner's work to the public. Distribution of materials over the Internet or an intranet could infringe this new right if the materials include text, images, audio recordings and video recordings that are owned by a third party - i.e. if you have not created them yourself as original works.

The term "communication to the public" should be understood in a broad sense, covering all communication to the public not present at the place where the communication originates. This means you must obtain the copyright owner's permission before posting the owner's work on the Internet, an intranet or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), including password-protected websites and VLEs. There is also a new obligation that sufficient acknowledgement (e.g. the author's name plus a bibliographic citation) is required. See the following document:

Oppenheim C. (2004) Recent changes to copyright law and the implications for FE and HE:

http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/co...tcoppenheim.htm

The definition of "the public" is understood to include small sub-sets of the public. Oppenheim's document states:

What constitutes "the public"? Presumably a small sub-set of the public, such as staff and/or students in an educational institution, will be considered to be the public. That is certainly the view of the Department of Trade and Industry, which is the government department responsible for copyright law in the UK. Thus, an institution placing material on an intranet without the copyright owner's permission would be infringing this right, even if relatively few people had access to the intranet.

Edited by Graham Davies
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Technical security issues are one aspect of the problems that educational institutions have to face. Copyright issues regarding the materials to which students have access are another aspect.

Sorry Graham, interesting though this is, I am struggling to see the relevance of this to my situation. The students will be given permission to set up their own internet connections on College laptops and therefore have access to the internet.

The main reason for this is to enable them to access my Online Sociology course which has been authored (with all its flaws!) by me. I also want them to be able to access the Student Education Forum for online debate and feedback.

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Andy, it's obviously not relevant to your situation. I only made the point because a number of schools are putting up copyright material on their intranets and password-protected websites, believing that they are in the clear and protected under the definition of "fair dealing" that allows them, for example, to disseminate copyright material to their students within the terms of their CLA and ERA licences. It seems that the "communication to the public" right embodied in the 2003 regulations has tightened things up and that some schools are now laying themselves open to litigation. As Michael Caine used to say, "Not many people know that." ;)

Edited by Graham Davies
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Alex Savage (who's also just joined this forum) and we are struggling with this problem too. He's had video conferencing equipment gathering dust at his school for years, without being able to connect to anyone not within the four walls of his school …

He's meeting the county technicians (in Norfolk) just after the New Year, and I'll let you know what happens if it's relevant to your problem.

What we're trying to provide Alex with is technicians who can talk to his technicians about how we've solved this problem in Sweden. Marratech UK are also helping out (since Marratech is one of the programmes we want to use to communicate with each other with).

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Andy, it's obviously not relevant to your situation. I only made the point because a number of schools are putting up copyright material on their intranets and password-protected websites, believing that they are in the clear and protected under the definition of "fair dealing" that allows them, for example, to disseminate copyright material to their students within the terms of their CLA and ERA licences. It seems that the "communication to the public" right embodied in the 2003 regulations has tightened things up and that some schools are now laying themselves open to litigation. As Michael Caine used to say, "Not many people know that." ;)

When the headmaster of Bedford School confessed that they had been downloading my website illegally onto an Intranet he quoted the agreement for photocopying sections of books. This is why he claimed that this software only downloaded 10 pages of any website. Complete nonsense of course but someone is obviously putting it around that agreements with book publishers applies to websites.

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Andy, it's obviously not relevant to your situation. I only made the point because a number of schools are putting up copyright material on their intranets and password-protected websites, believing that they are in the clear and protected under the definition of "fair dealing" that allows them, for example, to disseminate copyright material to their students within the terms of their CLA and ERA licences. It seems that the "communication to the public" right embodied in the 2003 regulations has tightened things up and that some schools are now laying themselves open to litigation. As Michael Caine used to say, "Not many people know that." :)

When the headmaster of Bedford School confessed that they had been downloading my website illegally onto an Intranet he quoted the agreement for photocopying sections of books. This is why he claimed that this software only downloaded 10 pages of any website. Complete nonsense of course but someone is obviously putting it around that agreements with book publishers applies to websites.

They are not the only school to have tried to do this. We have had a similar problems with others. I wonder if there is a way to block such attempts from being successful? I know I managed to stop it on the forum some time ago by insisting that each user accepted cookies. It had undesirable side effects however.

Getting back to my project!!

I have managed to persuade the tekkies that the sky won't actually fall in if we allow the students to access the internet from their laptops. ;)

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I think I must be missing something, but I'm a bit confused... Why are the kids taking the laptops home? Surely if they have an internet connection at home, then there must be a computer there already? We have justbought a class set of laptops which are connected wirelessly to the school's intranet and from there to the internet. This means everything is nicely controlled and safe from nasty viruses, etc...

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I think I must be missing something, but I'm a bit confused...

A senior moment perhaps??

We have decided not to pay for home based internet access but they are encouraged to set up their own. They can of course use the College network points when they are in College.

They are taking them home I suppose for all the reasons we used to let the students take textbooks home B)

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Which arguments did you use with your tekkies to allow you to get through the firewall?

They might work for Alex Savage too.

I threatened to break their legs :tomatoes

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