Last week part of each my 3 presentations at The Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference was about Skype audio and video-conferencing. So this week I got emails from a teacher in my district wondering how I bypassed school district filters to use it. To make a long story short what I eventually realized was that the Skype web site is blocked by the school district (it wasn’t as late as January the last time I downloaded Skype to a computer at school) but using Skype is not blocked. If you already have the software installed you can get out – no problem. So I just found the teacher an alternate site to download the software – but I haven’t heard back yet to see if she has been successful.

We tried to figure out why access to the Skype web site would be blocked. The only idea we had was that IT is afraid of the impact of having “too many” teachers Skypeing (whatever that threshold is).