What Are Students Spending Most Time On?

As more districts adopt platforms like Chromebooks and iPads, critical questions that would give senior leadership teams the confidence they need to expand smaller pilot programs remain unanswered. How much time are students spending on educational sites versus non-educational sites? Which educational apps are the most popular?

Securly provides reporting based on a logged in user’s Google Apps ID. This has been especially useful for schools that have chosen to “go Google” by moving to the free Apps for Education platform. The launch of Securly’s achievement analytics helps school leadership use a combination of highly visual charts and simple commands to answer questions about aggregate student activity. Examples of data that can be mined from Securly’s Analytics engine include:

What are students spending most time on? : At a glance, a user is able to see if students are spending time on the right things. This would be the basis for figuring out return on investment for EdTech spend.

What are students searching on Google? : This is especially important given that online behavior can a leading indicator of offline behavior.

What are kids spending time on at home? : Is there an educational benefit to sending devices home?

Who are the top users accessing the websites related to narcotics? : The proverbial needle in the haystack that could facilitate early intervention.

From a web-filtering and compliance perspective, Securly’s Analytics engine addresses a critical need that schools face. In a world where children are required to learn from social media websites like YouTube and Wikipedia (thanks to common core requirements adopted by 45 out of 50 states), simple “blocking” of these web-sites is no longer enough. This is especially true given that these websites often harbor age-inappropriate content. The point of web-filtering is no longer just to block. The point is to modify behavior. This makes auditing and analytics based on user-identity necessary.”

The offering was driven by real customer demand for a solution that answers questions on student screen-time and is able to disseminate that information to IT admins, teachers, principals and parents. The company has been running the feature in beta for several months already and feedback from users has been consistently positive.

“Being able to perform high performance indexing and lookups on Terabytes of student data in the cloud while maintaining performance is a hard engineering problem and the Securly R&D team is proud to have accomplished this,” said Securly CEO Vinay Mahadik. “The kind of functionality included in the offering was until now achievable only by a combination of high-end appliances and locally hosted software.”

Given their low price-point, high usability and integration with Google’s free Apps for Education suite of tools, Chromebooks have become a platform of choice for schools that are adopting 1:1 initiatives. As of October 2013, these devices were being used by 22% of all US K-12 school districts. While a primary driver of these district-level Chromebook purchases has been online student assessments, the adoption of newer pedagogical models like “Flipped Classroom” has had an impact as well. The latter makes it imperative for Chromebooks to go home with students in order for the district’s 1:1 initiative to have any chance of success. A natural question that is raised by teachers, district leadership and parents alike as Chromebooks are sent home is – “How does one ensure online safety on these devices? Sending a device home without monitoring and content protection would put our students at unnecessary risk and open our institution to significant legal action.

The status-quo is dominated by appliance-based proxy solutions. This involves the setup and maintenance of an on-premise hardware appliance. The existing approach has a number of disadvantages. First, since each appliance can support a finite number of concurrent connections, larger take-home programs would require districts to acquire and manage multiple appliances. Second, the fact that all of the students’ home traffic is routed back through the school’s network makes IT departments that are already stretched thin responsible for network uptime even during off-hours. This also limits students’ browsing speeds to the school’s uplink capacity which for the most part tends to be a lot lower. Finally, the status-quo’s inability to play well with Google Apps makes for a sub-optimal User Experience.

Securly’s Chrome plugin makes deploying a 1:1 take-home Chromebook filtering solution an easy 5-minute task. The plugin can be pushed out to Chromebooks via the Google Apps Admin Control panel. IT Admins can use the Securly dashboard to assign granular policies to their Google Apps Organizational Units. Securly reports student activity by their Google ID. IT Admins can also use the Securly dashboard to visualize student activity and the Audit Trail to drill deep into an individual student’s screen-time in a matter of minutes.

Said Romeo Community Schools’ Technology Director Mark Nelson of his districts experience working with Securly’s take-home filtering solution – “As our district embarked on a program to send 3300 Chromebooks home with our middle and high school students, we turned to Securly. Their policy editor allows an easy way to set policies by school or grade level. Additionally, Securly’s take-home policy allows sites and categories that might be distracting in the classroom to be accessed when the school day ends and students connect from home networks.”

Securly was the first web-filter to integrate with Google Apps for single sign-on so schools with a heterogeneous mix of iPads, Windows, Macs, and Chromebooks could get granular policies per their organizational units. With today’s offering, Securly allows IT admins to safely pilot and secure their 1:1 Chromebook programs, while reserving the ability to seamlessly expand the filtering to the rest of the district’s devices.

Securly is the world’s leading provider of unified cloud based security for K-12 schools. The founding team has a combined 20+ years of experience in the enterprise 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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