Ensuring Offsite Security for Take-Home Student and Staff Devices
The district went remote from March of 2020 through the end of that school year. When they re-opened in the fall, 100 percent of its students were remote for the first two weeks, and for the next nine weeks, 50 percent of its students logged in from home for their classes.
While the district had been issuing one-to-one devices to students in fourth through 12th grades for about nine years, that was not the case for pre-K through third grade students.
So, over spring break and the following week, the district had to configure multiple device types for staff and students. It also had to repurpose thousands of classroom tablets for students in pre-K to third grade and acquire Chromebooks for other students and Windows laptops for staff, many of whom had never had take-home devices before. More than 1,000 registrars, bookkeepers, clerks and other front-office staff transitioned from desktops to laptops to work from home.
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The IT team ensured the devices would maintain the same filtering and security offsite as they would on campus by configuring them with the cloud security platform Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection, a VPN app and a content filtering tool.
Blocking Fraudulent Emails, Websites and Unemployment Claims
Like many other K–12 districts, Lewisville ISD saw an increase in malicious activity during remote learning, including fraudulent unemployment claims. However, Langford said his team’s due diligence ahead of time paid off.
In the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, “we saw a major increase in phishing and malicious emails from what we normally see, which we were expecting to happen,” he said. The IT team was able to block some 16.7 million malicious emails between mid-August and mid-September of 2020 using Cisco Cloud Email Security.