Social media sites by-definition contain user-uploaded content. This content can frequently be uncurated and therefore inappropriate for safe use in schools. Nevertheless, educators feel compelled to introduce students to the power of tools such as Wikipedia and blogging services (Tumblr, Weebly etc). Securly allows admins to block individual pages on such sites while allowing the rest of the site. We use a list of 1000s of low noise keywords to look for unsafe pages on such sites.
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and Social media sites like YouTube have become necessary tools of instruction in the 21th century classroom. These are often the first places a student would go to while researching a class project. However, as an educator, you are all too aware of the perils that unfiltered access to these tools can bring. An innocuous search term can end up as a major classroom distraction. Securly forces on safety mode in Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube. Any attempts to turn off safety mode will be intercepted and blocked by Securly. On top of the safety-modes of these sites, we use our own dictionary of unsafe keywords to determine if a search should be allowed or not. Further, we also block a long list of other unsafe search engines and social media sites.
Two years ago, when we founded Securly – there were many granular “parental control” solutions on the market but all of those worked only for a specific device. It was clear that an ideal solution was to come through a “Net Nanny” for K-12 devices but one that could work across a heterogeneous mix of devices across the district, ubiquitously both on and off campus, and with a simple setup process that didn’t explode with the size of the district. Inspired by the simplicity of the OpenDNS setup and the granularity of players such as Palo Alto Networks, we took two pain-staking years to build the patent-pending technology that powers Securly. We started with DNS, and first provided granular GApps based Single-sign-on policing and reporting for students. Next, we achieved powerful granular control and monitoring such as proactively enforcing Google and YouTube’s safety mode, blocking personal @gmail logins while allowing district Google mail logins, and much more – all from a simple DNS based setup.
Monitoring Social-posts: Today, we also released our beta “Social-posts” monitoring addition. We have only released it to our US West-coast customers and will soon make it available to the rest of the customer base. This feature allows IT and Instructional Tech personnel to monitor what high-schoolers are posting on Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter. In many of our schools, admins use a relaxed take-home policy where in-school, every one gets the “lowest-common-denominator” safest policy; however, for home use the take-home 1:1 devices handed out to high-schoolers are given relaxed policies with social-networking frequently left open. Securly makes it possible for educators to monitor online status-posts and tweets of students to shape their online behavior.
Securly’s “Social-posts” feature allows educators to shape behavior on social-networks
Like like the other granular features of our visual audit trails, this functionality is also not restricted only to Chromebooks or any other specific device, but is available to all devices deployed with Securly.
About Securly
Securly is the world’s leading provider of cloud-based security for K-12 schools. The founding team has a combined 20+ years of experience in the network security space. The company is a venture backed startup in Silicon Valley and serves hundreds of schools in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region,
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