Monitoring/Safeguarding/Key Logging Tools

[ChrisERoots]

Okay troops, before I bite the bullet. I'd like some feedback on what software you use to monitor students when it comes to safeguarding.

 

Impero

So far i've had a trial of Impero and have loved the Key Logging aspect of it. After getting over the excitement of it returning results, it is extremely chatty and returns a huge amount of false positives and the system itself on a full time basis is not as usable as you'd like it to be. Incidents need to be looked through individually and there's no way that we could see of getting reports to be returned in bulk each day rather than each time an infraction occurs. Classic educational software issue really.

 

Netsupport

Just seen a video for Netsuport DNA and straightway that looks like something much more effective in terms of searching through reported incidents. We already use a Netsupport & Notify so maybe this would be worth a look.

 

Am I missing something else keener that can do the job of reporting what the students are typing in to our computers?

[Rob_D]

We've used Securus for a long time, but you'd have similar issues to impero, in that going through all the false positives is pretty much a full time job.

Smoothwall's Visigo might be worth looking at, but it's still in development.

[Courtney_Impero]

Hi @ChrisERoots,

I've sent you a PM.

 

Many Thanks,

 

Courtney @ Impero

[RichCowell]

Don't let false positives put you off - I would be more suspicious of any software that didn't generate them (or many) - especially when reviewing on a trial basis... some terms can be tweaked to help, but to ensure a comprehensive level of monitoring, by the very nature of the type of content you're monitoring, there are loads of ways of saying things - some of which are going to affect completely innocent terms or uses too...

[ChrisERoots]

Thanks for that. Yeah, i'm not too put off by that. Its how it all comes through in terms of monitoring. All educational software seems to have pluses and minuses on that score. Going to give some others a test and see where this goes. Doesn't feel like theres a clear market leader at the moment.

[FN-GM]

Do you really need it? We don't have anything like this but instead use the Smoothwall safeguarding stuff. Just a few weeks ago one of our schools got an OFSTED rating of Outstanding in all areas including safeguarding.

[KevinB]

We found that the Impero solution works very well; yes there are some false positives but not too many in our experience. Configuring the different levels and the person to whom they raise an alert definitely helps in this regard.

[JordanT91]

Okay troops, before I bite the bullet. I'd like some feedback on what software you use to monitor students when it comes to safeguarding.

 

Impero

So far i've had a trial of Impero and have loved the Key Logging aspect of it. After getting over the excitement of it returning results, it is extremely chatty and returns a huge amount of false positives and the system itself on a full time basis is not as usable as you'd like it to be. Incidents need to be looked through individually and there's no way that we could see of getting reports to be returned in bulk each day rather than each time an infraction occurs. Classic educational software issue really.

 

Netsupport

Just seen a video for Netsuport DNA and straightway that looks like something much more effective in terms of searching through reported incidents. We already use a Netsupport & Notify so maybe this would be worth a look.

 

Am I missing something else keener that can do the job of reporting what the students are typing in to our computers?

 

We have Future Digital (previously called PCE or Policy Central Enterprise) through our LA.

[ChrisERoots]

Do you really need it? We don't have anything like this but instead use the Smoothwall safeguarding stuff. Just a few weeks ago one of our schools got an OFSTED rating of Outstanding in all areas including safeguarding.

 

Congrats on the Ofsted result. I've asked myself this question quite a lot too. The thing with Ofsted and Safeguarding and IT is that they almost never ask a Network Manager what products they're using. If a product ends up catching someone out and helps with the dossier of evidence for a student then Ofsted may see some report from the software which is being used.

 

As to whether or not we actually need it. I'll leave this one story here. Very recently an ICT teacher walked in to an ICT suite and noticed a student searching for info on committing suicide. The student quickly hid/closed the page but if it were not for that member of staff noticing what was on the screen, that student would have missed getting the help they needed.

 

Outstanding or not, these incidents do fly under the radar everyday. I certainly don't want to nanny our students however we have some duty of care to ensure that there is some vigilance of these actions. I just wish that there was a program that could do it all neatly & cost effectively.

[FN-GM]

As to whether or not we actually need it. I'll leave this one story here. Very recently an ICT teacher walked in to an ICT suite and noticed a student searching for info on committing suicide. The student quickly hid/closed the page but if it were not for that member of staff noticing what was on the screen, that student would have missed getting the help they needed.

 

Outstanding or not, these incidents do fly under the radar everyday. I certainly don't want to nanny our students however we have some duty of care to ensure that there is some vigilance of these actions. I just wish that there was a program that could do it all neatly & cost effectively.

 

Agree with you. Smoothwall will also pick this up and it did last year at another one of our schools. I was checking the report and it flagged a student looking up the methods to carry out suicide. It provides a full audit trail as to what the student was looking at.

[karldenton]

We use NetSupport DNA here for safeguarding and have for a while.

One of the main benefits is the "Safeguarding Users" setting. It means access can be given to the safeguarding staff for them to look through the alerts (or get sent the email). It takes the need off the IT manager to look through the alerts. The IT managers haven't had any training on how serious the alert maybe so it puts the onus on people that have.

 

Netsupport also works contextually, so if a keyword in the phrase bank was typed into powerpoint, it would get a lower alert than if it was typed into Chrome / IE, as the student may be doing a presentation and used the word, whereas on the internet they could be researching.

 

If you have any Netsupport queries feel free to drop me a PM