OpenDNS

I had a wonderful conversation with some of my middle school parents this morning.  The conversation was geared around technology use and our students.  We discussed many issues from the the use of personal technology in school, appropriate access to social media, and our push as a school to use cloud based applications.  The conversation was very dynamic and important.  Communication education about the use of technology in schools is so valuable. 

One question led to a discussion about how to monitor and block specific sites at home.  There are many desktop software products such as NetNanny that are very powerful.  This is software that would need to be installed on specific computers (or now devices) to monitor content.  Now that most households have a network of technology, it is sometimes better to monitor content from the network level.  This used to require expensive software of hardware, but there is a great service called OpenDNS that is free and easy to setup.

OpenDNS is a web based tool that allows you to use special defined DNS servers to monitor content on your network.  You simply change your DNS servers on your WiFi and wired router to the servers addresses OpenDNS provides and your network will essentially flow through the Open DNS database.  You can still manage how secure you would like the content to be, and you can also block specific sites that may not be blocked.  The beauty of OpenDNS is you can monitor all of this via a simple web browser, and it is very easy to setup via instructions on the website.  If you are looking for a low cost (Free) monitoring tool, take a look at OpenDNS.

Thank you once again to my parents that hosted and attended the discussion this morning!