Website restrictions and internet issues have hindered the learning ability of students taking Gaming Concepts

Gaming Concepts students face various challenges trying to access the internet and visit necessary websites

Staff Writer

Students taking Gaming Concepts have found it increasingly challenging to access required coursework and visit websites or download software relevant to the class due to internet connectivity issues and district restrictions this school year.

Computer issues at American this year have left students taking gaming concepts unable to access important coursework and sometimes even their entire school email. These problems were met with prolonged, sometimes insufficient solutions, “The last student to get access to their account took almost a month before he was actually able to get things submitted online” Mr. Elam said. As for students’ ability to access material, Mr. Elam is increasingly hindered by the district’s restrictions, requiring him to take excessive steps for his students to simply have an assignment to do that day. “When the entire class is 100% computer-based with no paper alternatives and you have a sizable number of people who can’t participate, it becomes incredibly difficult for them to stay up to date with the curriculum” said Mr. Elam.

Providing further insight into these issues, but from the perspective of a student, Gaming Concepts student Jeremiah Tan (12) shared many of the same concerns and frustrations as his teacher. “A lot of the time the internet does malfunction. Usually the solution is to just open our data on our phones and connect our computer on to it, but other times we just wait and hope the internet wizards do it’s thing” said Tan. “Some changes we could see is changes to the gaming restrictions in general because a lot of the time we can’t access Steam, a video game platform, on school computers and Mr. Elam has tried to work as hard as he can to get that to work,” said Tan.

An FUSD public information officer explained some of the reasoning behind restrictions on school-provided chromebooks. “We did a hardening of our security environment with google extensions, and that blocked many extensions that students had used in the past. This was different from previous years, and there are no plans to relax this hardening at this time” Laura Forrest said. However, for websites paramount to adequate learning, there are ways teachers can allow access to them. “For websites that teachers are using for instruction that are blocked, there is a pathway to get access to them, and that is for the teacher to put in a technology ticket” Forrest added. Students taking Gaming Concepts or computer-related classes often need to access websites that are typically blocked on school computers. “For a website that has important information and is related to instruction, teachers just need to submit that ticket and if there’s questions about it, we can have a conversation with our IT department and if needed our critical instruction department for them to whitelist the website” Forrest responded.

Mr. Elam, however, expressed his frustrations with these restrictions and their hindering of his ability to teach the class. “I have to submit a request to the district IT department and then that has to get approved by the principal, for example I wanted the students this week to look at a website for the game developer Riot Games and even though you can’t play any games on the website, it’s blocked because it has the word game in it.” Mr. Elam stated.