You’re told, “Okay class, get on your laptop and open this website.” You type in the address, and what do you get? An address that failed to load. At this point, you’re furious with the Internet, so you restart it. Once you restart it, you type in the address and the SonicWall has blocked it! SonicWall is good for blocking things that the school doesn’t want us to see, but it is detrimental to certain projects. When you search certain things, SonicWall won’t even bring up the Google results. This happens a lot, especially with picture searches. When you search for an image on Google, you find a lot that aren’t necessary. You do, usually, find one that is good for your project. When you enlarge it – so the picture isn’t blurry – it doesn’t come up because it is linked to a website that SonicWall has blocked. Even if the site is not appropriate for school use, the picture may be. For example, say you’re making a PowerPoint on how fruit is healthy and you want to make it a funny-yet-serious presentation. You decide that you will use fruit animal pictures to add humor. You find a really funny orange with a cat face in it. You try to enlarge it, and it is blocked just because it is linked to Facebook or a site dedicated to crude humor. Also, when going to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s web site, any word searched is blocked, even ‘education.’ Obviously SonicWall is flawed. Freedom’s Internet is another thing that’s frustrating. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. If it is working, it is often slow. Once more than five people in the class try to use the Internet, it starts to bog down and refuse to work. One of the school’s 8 learning outcomes is technology literacy. We use technology-based learning, but it’s next to impossible to learn when the Internet never works and useful sites are blocked. This is a dilemma that prevents many students from doing class work or homework. Many students at Freedom are glad to have the technology. Some other students feel that if you are going to give us laptops, then they should work correctly, and the Internet should be available to use.