At AHS, students are provided with Chromebooks and are expected to use them in ways that are beneficial to their education and grade.
Things like Schoology and SIS StudentVue are up to assist them do school work and check their grades. These resources are very helpful to students, but some students use computers in unintended ways, utilizing websites casually referred to as “unblockers”- websites that offer things like unblocked games or unblocked Google, through which students are enabled to access whatever websites they like.
“I use unblockers in almost every class I find boring since it’s a good way to pass time,” said freshman Jaydon Guerrero
Unblockers can ruin the focus of students and be detrimental to a students education, as their attention is not directed towards playing games. A recent trend for unblockers is to mask their website as an educational tool like the graphing calculator website Desmos. Others redirect the user through various different sites until they reach the unblocker. This is to ensure that if one of their links gets blocked, it won’t precisely be the actual unblocker.
“I have to use like three different unblockers every week cause of how much of them end up getting blocked,” said sophomore Adam Khaliqi
Another big unblocker is AI unblockers, which unblock various AI tools like ChatGPT. Students may use these to aid with assignments.
Teachers, administration, and the school tech leads have ways to detect unblockers but these aren’t always 100% effective and can sometimes let a few things slip through.
One way teachers have found to prevent people from using these unblockers is to use programs that allow them to view student activity from their computers, such as Lightspeed, or just allowing them to monitor their students screen to make sure they are on task.
But some unblockers allow students to hide their screen, by giving them a selection of different fakes screens, such as the Schoology homepage, Google Chrome homepage, among others. This is meant to deceive teachers into believing that they are on task and focusing on the work that is given to them.
“I’ve personally never been caught using my computer and playing games but I know at one point I’ll get caught,” said freshman Sujoy Sarker.
As a result, unblockers are pretty hard to detect which could become a bigger problem in the future. As long as students are given laptops, there will always be the potential for misuse, and finding another way to get around blocked websites.
“I feel like unblockers will probably be here to stay for the future,” said Guerrero.
