K-12 internet content filtering & proxy - any suggestions?

[sfigg]

I know this forum is sponsored by Smoothwall, but I would appreciate honesty if another filtering service may be better suited for our needs.

 

Our wants/setup:

 

• Filter ALL devices in our district. We have 6,000 Windows mahcines, 1,500 Chromebooks, 1,500 iPads, and BYOD (phones, laptops etc).
  
• We want to be able to setup a proxy that when kids bring home machines, we can force traffic to still go through the proxy while outside of our buildings.
  
• We *NEED* google safe search enabled, and high level image filtering basically. This is a big issue for us - we need as much safe content as possible when kids search for things.
  
• Ability to manage sites for specific OUs, machines, IPs, etc would be beneficial (whitelist, etc)
  

 

We've looked at Securly, which was brought up to us at a conference, and they require certificates on devices for them to be able to access HTTPS sites. This is fine for in-house machines, since we can force it via AD, MDM, and Google Admin for the Chromebooks....but for BYOD, anything that was HTTPS was being blocked. So people couldn't access Facebook or other things on their phones or tablets they brought in from home, because we couldn't force a certificate on them.

 

We are a very lenient district - we don't try to lock things down heavily - social media is fine for the most part, kids can chat, play games, etc - we just need the ability to really restrict what sites they visit, and more important, the content - google safe search, image search results, etc.

 

Any suggestions?

[elsiegee40]

Hi

 

I am on the app, so I can't see all your info. From your talk of Districts, am I correct that you are in the USA? Do you provide the broadband services to your schools like the UK regional grids for learning, or does each establishment have it's own service? As many of our members are British, it would be helpful to understand how you are set up.

[sfigg]

Yes, we're in the USA. We have a 1Gbps internet connection that is split up over 20 locations/buildings. The internet all filters through one central firewall currently, so we were hoping for some sort of solution to sit near the firewall and manage all content.