Educational technology, specifically to monitor student activity, only works as long as it can keep up with the students. As someone who experiences these solutions in use every day, I can affirm that the loopholes might outnumber the blocked sites.

For example, some students might want to play video games during class. A school can make efforts to mitigate this, such as using a platform like Securly to automatically block sites flagged as games, but that only goes so far. A coding class at my school uses MIT’s Scratch to create simple games — which means that they have to unblock it, allowing kids access to any game on that site. Additionally, sites used by teachers for quiz games, such as Blooket and Gimkit, can be repurposed by students with “all-correct” question sets to be used as games. Thirdly, I’ve seen that when a game happens to be unblocked, the link spreads like wildfire from email account to email account. As one example, I know of an unblocked website with an embedded game inside that involved moving a truck through an obstacle course (it looked pretty boring to me, but I guess the bar is pretty low, no pun intended).

That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66. It’s now blocked, but in a lot of ways, relying on IT to stay a step ahead of tech-savvy students seems like a recipe for ineffective policing.

Here’s something interesting: Even if a school blocks YouTube, there are educational tools teachers can use to create questions and those sites may well be unblocked. If you create a teacher account, you can watch any YouTube video even if the YouTube site itself is blocked.

Blocking sites just encourages kids to find loopholes and can only be a temporary solution. Schools should instead teach kids how to use technology responsibly and to trust the students at least somewhat — of course they should block actually inappropriate content. Is blocking easier for a school? — certainly. But is it actually better in the long run? — maybe not.