tom_newton Posted October 17, 2007 Posted October 17, 2007 'lo folks... The next version of SchoolGuardian will have IM monitoring features. It's a relatively late addition, but will log MSN, AOL, Yahoo! etc. Just wondering... do any of you allow kids to use IM? would IM monitoring be useful? If so, what tools would be helpful to you? Tom
mrforgetful Posted October 17, 2007 Posted October 17, 2007 We don't allow it, we have Policy Central which would log it apparantly.
plexer Posted October 17, 2007 Posted October 17, 2007 I suppose abusive word monitoring which would be the same as the current content filtering for web pages but applied to the IM traffic as well. Ben
PEO Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 We have disabled it here because were miserable people that like to make the kids life’s miserable
tom_newton Posted October 18, 2007 Author Posted October 18, 2007 Bad word censorship is in there - bit light on reports/alerts so far as is the usual way with new bits! Incidentally the price is good - £0! Would any of you folk consider allowing MSN etc, if it was logged?
mrforgetful Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 plexer - This Policy Central does abusive word monitoring. Basically we got it free from the LEA they did a group buy on behalf of all the schools. http://www.forensicsoftware.com for the website of the makers. We had a couple of demos to see if we were interested and it looks great. If anyone types or opens a document/web page with a banned word it takes a screenshot, stamps it with name, computer, time and stores it on a server. You can create groups for users who and assign those groups different staff to monitor them, eg. Year 7 with the Head of Year notified by email when a violation occurs and given access to view only Year 7 violations. You can choose different categories of words for different groups from Bullying, Swearing, Violence etc... All sounds great on the surface. In reality I've found it almost useless. It captures over 1000 screenshots a day. Most of the captures are webpages which have comments posted by anyone so the student who's opened it has done nothing wrong, but you've got to look through them all anyway. You have words in the categories that while valid, throw up to many false positives I've not had a valid positive yet ie facial, webcam etc.. I haven't given anyone else access or assigned groups to people as I know noone will check it for more than a few days due to the high amount of irrelevancy. Shame I had high hopes for it too.
mrforgetful Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 tom_newton - Students are here to learn. They spend enough time chatting on email nevermind having replies come instantly.
plexer Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 mrforgetful: our lea punts securus as their solution but charge anyone that wants to have it handsomely. Ben
Ric_ Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 @Tom: IM monitoring is a great addition but I think you will find many RBCs cripple it anyway. An interesting idea might be if it could monitor an internal Jabber server so that staff could use IM between each other. This would require reporting to show the amount of time a user is actually using IM (messages sent/received per hour maybe?) If the system could monitor web-based IM too we could foil those kids that find web clients to get around proxies and the like.
mrforgetful Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Yesh Ric_ has a good point there, anything that could log use of those secret IMs would be great.
Ric_ Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Yesh Ric_ has a good point there, anything that could log use of those secret IMs would be great. Of course SchoolGuardian should block them but it might be an idea to be able to say "you know that you should not be using IM but you spent 35minutes during epriod 3 yesterday chatting to somebody called Mr Big... explain yourself" It would produce a greater amount of accountability.
MkII Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Just discussing this last night. Tarquels new employer - a local authority, log all IM conversations, so no one uses it! So how does the bad word censorship work? As we have corporate guardian, I presume that only affects traffic passing through it, and not conversations on the LAN?
Gatt Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Ive started to implement Office Communicator to the teachers on our Pupil Network (seperate from LEA's) but will NOT be giving the kiddies access to it - IM's are banned as per school policy and as someone previously said, email as abused enough without adding IM's into the field.. ASked the LEA if they can setup the accounts for the staff as well just waiting on a reply I know they use it cos i can see the fields in their AD console. Think IM would be good on a staff basis but not for the kids..
russdev Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Where this would be good is private schools where they have borders etc who you give im access to but want to monitor it. Russell
dave.81 Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 Being a boarding school we do allow ebuddy etc over the weekends but have now banned MSN etc due to file transfers. The clever little sods where getting whole films sent to them via msn so thats now stopped. Although it is the bain of my life repeating why it is banned lol. If we ever do open it up again then being able to monitor it in some way would be very useful.
pete Posted October 18, 2007 Posted October 18, 2007 @tom Not really, since (even if it was only allowed in the sixth form computing rooms/at lunchtimes) workstations would be full of kids im-ing to the detriment of kids who need to get on the machines to do schoolwork.
tom_newton Posted October 18, 2007 Author Posted October 18, 2007 Wow, thanks for all the responses guys! @ mark - the protocols we currently scan (MSN,Yahoo,ICQ,AOL) are all too dumb to do peer-to-peer so you *can* monitor same-subnet communications (result!) @Ric: Jabber is on the list *but* if you had an internal server, we might have trouble monitoring at the gateway - will have to see how it goes mind. @dave: filetransfer blocking will definitely be added in - so you'll be able to say "yes chat, no filez" which will be a laugh File AV.. now that looks HARD but we'll give it a tinkle nontheless Cheers guys! Tom
gh256 Posted October 19, 2007 Posted October 19, 2007 Bad word censorship is in there - bit light on reports/alerts so far as is the usual way with new bits! Incidentally the price is good - £0! Would any of you folk consider allowing MSN etc, if it was logged? Is the software free then?
webman Posted October 19, 2007 Posted October 19, 2007 Ha! You gotta be joking. It costs virtually an arm and leg...
tom_newton Posted October 22, 2007 Author Posted October 22, 2007 The software will be a free upgrade to our existing users, but it is based on an open source system developed by one of our engineers.
Guest Guest Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 Ha! You gotta be joking. It costs virtually an arm and leg... TBF school gardian is *extreamly* reasonably priced compared to what we have been forced to buy into. And the features, reliability, speed, ease of use, etc etc etc etc justify it no end. One day, maybe, probably not, we might get SG, though i wont hold my breath.
gh256 Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 Im guessing you might not say but is the open source stuff avalible. Ah found it.
dave.81 Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 Ha! You gotta be joking. It costs virtually an arm and leg... TBF school gardian is *extreamly* reasonably priced compared to what we have been forced to buy into. And the features, reliability, speed, ease of use, etc etc etc etc justify it no end. One day, maybe, probably not, we might get SG, though i wont hold my breath. Have to agree with j17sparky on this one, we have used open source packages and paid ones in the past 7 years and SG is by far and away the best alround package. The way i see it the money spent on SG saves me so much time it's well worth it.
tom_newton Posted October 22, 2007 Author Posted October 22, 2007 @gh - we don't hide it... i shoulda mentioned it - imspector.org - great name, eh? I wrote the MySQL plugin, so don't use that ;-P j17, dave - thanks for the vote of confidence
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