London Grid for Learning Webscreen 2.0

[fiza]

Just want to find out how many London Grid For Learning Schools have moved away from LGFLs web filter (netsweeeper/webscreen 2.0) but remain with LGFL for their broadband connection. Edited March 20, 2015 by fiza

[RichS]

Still using the standard filtering, more than adequate enough and not had any major problems.

[fiza]

@RichS Are you able to block this site with Webscreen 2.0? https://sites.google.com/site/millseagles/

 

It has a chat function which is not appropriate. @rad has been trying to get LGFL to block it without much success.

[RichS]

We block https://sites.google.com as a whole. Too many kids finding proxy type sites. From what I have been told, you cant filter past the .com/ bit as its encrypted. The filtering sees the initial domain so we just blocked that and manually unblock the google sites that we want. Hope that helps?

[fiza]

We block https://sites.google.com as a whole. Too many kids finding proxy type sites. From what I have been told, you cant filter past the .com/ bit as its encrypted. The filtering sees the initial domain so we just blocked that and manually unblock the google sites that we want. Hope that helps?

 

Unfortunately they don't do https inspection like smoothwall or lightspeed

[RichS]

We have no internal filtering system but doing this works well for us, but no I don't think they go into that... however the previous tech here had a sonicwall in the way and it caused chaos with our authenticating because the lgfl only see 1 ip rather than all of them.

[fiza]

@RichS - I find it quite restrictive.

We have occasions when staff want students to use youtube in a particular room at a particular time. At the moment we have to switch on youtube for all students to enable this.

How do you deal with situations like this?

[RichS]

Time based policies to certain IPs, we only allow youtube for staff and students in the community room. Only between 2pm and 4pm and it seems to work fine?

I suppose authentication wise, it would be problematic because kids aren't using USO accounts but our comm room is all static machines anyway.

[fiza]

Time based policies to certain IPs, we only allow youtube for staff and students in the community room. Only between 2pm and 4pm and it seems to work fine?

I suppose authentication wise, it would be problematic because kids aren't using USO accounts but our comm room is all static machines anyway.

 

We use dhcp. no static or reserved IP addresses except for printers and servers.

[RichS]

Ah if they use authentication it would work with a time policy set to specific times. Easy enough with staff as they mainly remember their details!

[rad]

As mentioned I had issues, I have added sites.google.com and will watch the students to see what occurs.

We have FB and youtube blocked, yet using Firefox there is a way around the block, never seen how the students manage it, however the way to stop it according to LGFL (by blocking host is an IP category) breaks Sims Learning Gateway and something else and stops them working.... oh the blimin joys of webfiltering.

[Phoenix_IT]

To be honest, I've supported a number of schools in London, and a few have had issues will all filtering solutions until they have been trained on it.

 

I personally don't have a problem with webscreen, once a school has confirmed what they want, I've always been able to set it up, yes the not being able to block below the .com on https sites can be a bit of a pain at times, but this is because they do not use a proxy server, the reason proxys server can is because they are effectivily doing a 'man-in-the-middle' style attack, this means they 'could' see everything you do, including your personal banking details - a reason I don't like using them, where as not using a proxy ensures the https tunnel is kept as secure as possible between your client and the website.

 

To sum my views up, there are pro's and con's to every solution, there is not a single solution students have not been able to bypass, and not a single solution that is 100% perfect, the important thing is making sure you are training on what ever solution you are using, and at least have something in place.

[RichS]

As mentioned I had issues, I have added sites.google.com and will watch the students to see what occurs.

We have FB and youtube blocked, yet using Firefox there is a way around the block, never seen how the students manage it, however the way to stop it according to LGFL (by blocking host is an IP category) breaks Sims Learning Gateway and something else and stops them working.... oh the blimin joys of webfiltering.

 

It may or may not help but if you know the range that SIMS learning gateway uses, or if you ping it and get the IP you bang that IP into ho is or domaintools or similar, take the full range that they put in there so like 172.10.50.0 - 172.10.57.255 and just add it to your filtering like http://172.10.50.0-172.10.57.255 and https exactly the same way, with no spaces.

 

We block host is an ip completely and just remove the blocks for things that students may need.

[fiza]

What e-safety software, if any, do you use to complement Webscreen 2.0? If you have an incident of a student searching for say, self-harm, but not clicking into any links would your systems pick that up? The student could do with help rather than just being blocked and no one knowing.

[RichS]

Very good question... our governors request details about people browsing to facebook and being blocked, just on averages so we use the webscreen report page, you can do categories on there. We just pull ones that deal with social networks, adult pages and games but there is a self help one on there so if requested I guess we can do that! However it can be a faff as we have DHCP in classrooms so tying down the machines can be a bit of a pain but students tend to use the same machines each session.

[fiza]

Very good question... our governors request details about people browsing to facebook and being blocked, just on averages so we use the webscreen report page, you can do categories on there. We just pull ones that deal with social networks, adult pages and games but there is a self help one on there so if requested I guess we can do that! However it can be a faff as we have DHCP in classrooms so tying down the machines can be a bit of a pain but students tend to use the same machines each session.

 

My question was about self harm not self help! Webscreen can do reports on blocked pages but not on searches carried out afaik.

[RichS]

Self harm sites are likely categorised as self help or something similar. I'll have a look today as I've got a few reports needed anyway and see what I can pick out when i do weird searches etc

[RichS]

Just has a look, I see, it would take some time for us to get comprehensive lists of things like that. something for us as a school to think of so thanks! However, it appears you can run reports for all the categories so might be helpful, might not!

[fiza]

I hate the fact that it takes 24 hours to run a report that contains information relating to 1 hours worth of web logs. We wanted information for 1 IP address for 1 hour of the day. Ran the report yesterday, still "waiting to be processed". If you have an E-Safety incident you don't want to wait 24 hours before being able to supply SLT with the information.

[BromleyTech]

Webscreen works well for the schools I'm involved with. For the majority of schools we've just set up 2/3 policy groups - IP policy for students & then user list policies for staff to allow authenticated access to YouTube etc. I think the trick is to keep it simple & not try and over complicate, unless really needed.

 

There may be some limitations with Webscreen but the other products we've looked at in the past also had shortcomings and there was little point in paying for another product when the one bundled with LGfL does the job well

[fiza]

Webscreen works well for the schools I'm involved with. For the majority of schools we've just set up 2/3 policy groups - IP policy for students & then user list policies for staff to allow authenticated access to YouTube etc. I think the trick is to keep it simple & not try and over complicate, unless really needed.

 

There may be some limitations with Webscreen but the other products we've looked at in the past also had shortcomings and there was little point in paying for another product when the one bundled with LGfL does the job well

 

How do you deal with a situation where you are asked to report on what young johnny was looking at in room 21 at lunchtime. There were other students in there too but no staff member. The students weren't meant to be in there and SLT think that johnny was searching for inappropriate material such as "self harm" sites. How quickly can webscreen give you those results?

[Phoenix_IT]

I've come across this myself once, however as my DHCP leases are set to 8 hours on the wired network, and I audit the IP's students log into, I get the IP address of that workstation, then just run the report on that IP address.

[fiza]

I've come across this myself once, however as my DHCP leases are set to 8 hours on the wired network, and I audit the IP's students log into, I get the IP address of that workstation, then just run the report on that IP address.

 

My issue is that it takes 24hrs for that report to come back. When you have an e-safety incident people want answers straight away.

[Phoenix_IT]

Even if you limit to the specific IP in a time frame? Thats the reason I have auditing on the networks I look after, so I can see what workstations students have logged onto - after having a lovely child who decided to log in as another child in his class and delete all there work, we tracked it all back on the audits - no internet access in this case, but the same method could be used.

[fiza]

Even if you limit to the specific IP in a time frame? Thats the reason I have auditing on the networks I look after, so I can see what workstations students have logged onto - after having a lovely child who decided to log in as another child in his class and delete all there work, we tracked it all back on the audits - no internet access in this case, but the same method could be used.

 

How can you track it back if student A logged on as student B and deleted all their work the logs would only show that Student B logged on. How do you track down student A?