For now, Relay applies only to classroom use because students don’t take the devices home. Next year, however, the district will roll out one-to-one devices for high school students, and Millerwurst anticipates deploying it for them as well.
“The way the technology works, we can have filtering and monitoring anywhere — on campus or offsite,” he says.
Support from Parents Grows as Monitoring Gains Traction in Schools
In recent months, monitoring tools have led Galway administrators to initiate a few interventions, Millerwurst says.
“The good thing is, we can see these warning signs, or these behaviors that are concerning, and talk to their teachers and take steps to do something about it,” he says.
That’s one reason parents appreciate these solutions, says Matt Federoff, CIO at Vail School District in Arizona.
“Every once in a while, someone is concerned about monitoring, but once you explain the risks, you get a lot less pushback,” he says.
LEARN MORE: Discover how content monitoring tools help K-12 IT officials patrol internet boundaries.
Filters Create Flexibility for both Students and Teachers
Vail sends about 4,500 Chromebooks home with students in grades eight and up. To protect both devices and users, Federoff’s team relies on a cloud-based filtering and monitoring solution from Securly. The platform keeps the district CIPA-compliant and provides a range of reporting functions comparable to those offered by Relay (McAfee, Juniper and Fortinet also provide content monitoring solutions).
“We generally use the reporting in a reactive fashion,” says Federoff. “If we become aware of something that merits a response, we’ll pull up seven days of reports and share them with the administration and with the child’s parents so they can take action.”
To manage the complexities and nuance inherent in academic internet use, Securly also supports multiple profiles.
“We have our regular profile that allows things like social media at certain times of day, our ‘no fun’ profile that’s much more restrictive and a curfew profile that turns the machines off every night at 10 o’clock,” Federoff says.
In the classroom, teachers can use the platform to view (and lock) students’ screens, restrict web browsing to specific sites and remotely control tabs on their browsers. One of his priorities, Federoff says, is to ensure that filters designed to protect students don’t interfere with a teacher’s ability to use legitimate online resources during class.
“We want to be responsive to their instructional needs,” he says. “If a teacher reaches out to one of my staff and says, ‘Hey, this is a good site, can you please unblock it for the kids?’ we’re going to take care of it right away.”