The addition of Chromebooks to DeKalb County schools was intended to enrich the learning environments, but with so many blocked websites, many students wonder if the computers are really able to fulfill their purpose.

Sites such as Netflix and Facebook are appropriately blocked, but when the county’s filters prevent students from using the internet for educational purposes, the fancy, new laptops lose a lot of their usefulness.

Junior Natalia Carlson’s musical theater class has a problem when trying to use Spotify as backing tracks for their singing.

“All the tracks we use for musical theater are on Spotify, so instead of everyone having to pay for them, we used to use Spotify,” said Carlson, “But now it’s blocked, so we can’t do that anymore.”

Freshman Esha Pamidi’s German class was assigned to write an essay based on the movie “Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder” [“A City Searches for a Murderer”], which they were told to watch on their Chromebooks.

“It wouldn’t load because it was not an approved YouTube video,” said Pamidi. “Instead we just did nothing.”

Another problem arose in health class when Pamidi was required to research the heart for a project.

“The cardiology website was educational and just stating information, but it was blocked,” said Pamidi. “It made it really hard to complete the assignment.”

Junior Julia Weil’s German class was told to read an article from Planet Wissen, a German collaboration between several broadcasting companies.

“Because Planet Wissen wouldn’t work on the Chromebooks, we had to read it off of the ActivBoard,” said Weil.

Although it wasn’t too big of an issue this time, such a limit on the Chromebooks could be a hindrance later.

“I could see in the future that it could be a problem,” said Weil. “We wouldn’t be able to move at our own pace on an activity based off of an article, which is kind of the purpose of the Chromebooks.”

Junior Isabel Bradford enjoys the use of innocuous Merriam-Webster dictionary, a website which has no reason to be blocked.

“I was reading an article […] and I didn’t know what [a word] meant […], so I went to Merriam-Webster,” said Bradford. “The website came up, but all the pictures had the little crossing signs instead of pictures, and then the entire website went away and it said ‘cannot reach this website.’”

The blocking of a website so blatantly educational does not make very much sense.

“It was very frustrating because Merriam-Webster is my favorite dictionary, and it’s blocked, so I can’t look up definitions,” said Bradford.

However, when a website is blocked that should not be, students or faculty can contact DeKalb County.

“You go to the DeKalb website, click ‘Contact Me’ and write a message,” said junior Bennett Solomon. “At least, that’s what I was able to do.”