Freedom Area Middle School installed a software called Blocksi on student Chromebooks in February. Blocksi is a program that allows teacher computers to act as a monitoring system. This lets teachers see all of their students’ activity on their Chromebooks from their laptop screen. Another feature is as soon as any student goes on a website, the teacher can click a button and that website can be blocked. 

A lot of students are really mad about the installation of the new program, Blocksi. Blocksi is a software that was recently installed on all Chromebooks. The reason a lot of students are mad is because a lot of the games that they play have been blocked. 

“The school administration and faculty staff have been looking at various programs to address the safety and educational usage of student Chromebooks in schools for a while now. We as an educational staff believe it is important that we create a nurturing and safe environment that is conducive for learning, and the ability to monitor and protect our students of things they can access online during school hours is a key component of providing such an environment,” says Mr. Dante DeNome, eighth grade history teacher.

A lot of students dislike Blocksi, but it is good for them at the same time, they just don’t realize it. This gives students a better ability to actually pay attention to their class. This also allows students to devote more time to put effort into their work. They may hate it right now, but they’ll realize it will be good for them in the future.

“Blocksi works very well on Chromebooks.   Blocksi is designed to assist teachers with technology classroom management. It is intended to keep our students on task and help control distractions while in class.  It offers web filtering to our students to keep them safe while searching the internet.  In the Blocksi teacher dashboard, our teachers have control to restrict websites for students or allow videos like educational YouTube videos that have been blocked by past web filters.  Blocksi also allows our teachers to share their screens, keep students on a particular page and offer information directly to each student while monitoring the students while in the classroom.  Also Blocksi integrates with Google Classroom, which our students have become accustomed to over the last couple school years,” Mrs. Marie Dohanich, Director of Technology, said.