Educational technology, especially for monitoring student activity, only works as long as it can keep pace with students. As someone who experiences the use of these solutions every day, I can confirm that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of blocking sites.
For example, some students may want to play video games during class. A school can make efforts to mitigate this, such as using a platform like Securely to automatically block sites marked as games, but this only goes so far. A coding class at my school uses MIT’s Scratch to create simple games – which means they have to unblock it, giving kids access to any game on that site. Additionally, sites used by teachers for quiz games, such as BlueKit and Gimkit, can be repurposed for students to use as games with “all-correct” question sets. Third, I’ve noticed that when a game is unblocked, the link spreads like wildfire from email account to email account. As an example, I know of an unblocked website that has an embedded game inside that involves driving a truck through an obstacle course (it seemed pretty boring to me, but I think the bar is quite low, no joke intended).
This does not mean that a school system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school unblocked 66 spammy-seeming games. This is now blocked, but in many ways, relying on IT to stay one 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 that teachers can use to create questions and those sites can be easily unblocked. If you create a teacher account, you can watch any YouTube video, even if the YouTube site is blocked.
Blocking sites encourages children to find loopholes and can only be a temporary solution. Instead schools should teach kids to use technology responsibly and trust students at least to some extent – of course they should actually block inappropriate content. Is it easy to block for school? – Definitely. But is it really better in the long run? – Probably not.