Safeguarding school owned devices away from network

[timbo343]

What with the government issuing either Chromebooks, winbooks (or laptop), tablets to vulnerable and SEND students, some schools may be in the same position as us where this is the first time we are issuing school owned devices to students to use away from the network. I'm wondering what schools are using to safe guard the students that use them.

 

This may tie in nicely with device management however the main point of this thread is to grasp an idea of what systems are being used or looked at in schools.

 

I am aware that we can push our Smoothwall filtering to Chromebooks via the Chrome extension but this only covers a third of what we need to be doing to protect students. The second third is device management but there seems to be a gap in the final third for safeguarding and reporting.

 

An example would be if a student was to type in "i want to kill myself" (as an example). This would then alert the DSL and other listed users.

 

From what i understand we have opted for Chromebooks however there maybe some scope for Windows devices in the future.

 

I am aware of..

- Impero (we use impero already) offer a Hybrid model to push out our own policies to off site devices and we are able to do central reporting from these devices. The hybrod model also gives a few little other nice features too

- Smoothwall have the Smoothwall Monitor which looks to be a good option too.

 

Does anyone use these systems and is there others out there that we are not aware of?

Edited May 8, 2020 by timbo343

[Wubbalubbadub]

I reworked our entire setup to work this exact problem.

 

I have got rid of all on site storage, and migrated to onedrive and SharePoint. So now all my devices sign in automatically for storage.

 

I then have cached logins setup, so k can keep the devices domained.

 

Lastly SENSO.Cloud is installed on the devices, doing all the safeguarding and allowing us to remotely manage if needed.

 

Senso.Cloud is a better replacement for impero. In my opinion.

[dhicks]

This may tie in nicely with device management however the main point of this thread is to grasp an idea of what systems are being used or looked at in schools.

 

A subtle difference when it comes to GSuite / ChromeOS: things like Chrome extensions and settings follow user accounts around, not devices (or, at least, you can choose between the two). For school-controlled devices you can limit logins to school-only accounts, but even if a user is using a different device it means they can still pick up school settings. For most home setups, of course, there's nothing to stop a child simply opening a new private session browser window, but for a school-controlled Windows machine it means if you can limit a user's ability to use different / private browsers you can be sure they have the same filtering or other settings as a ChromeOS device. It also means that for younger pupils, supervised by an adult to make sure they aren't opening new browser windows or whatever, they can be given restricted access to things like YouTube with appropriate content limitations in place.

[rogerdnixon]

We use Securly on managed Chromebooks and PCs. Chromebook they get the extension forced and PCs/Macs the Securly SmartPAC file. This is in MAT setup. Each school has its own policies and safeguarding teams. The safeguarding teams get email alerts for sites, searches, email content and Google Docs content. the can also login and just see their schools stuff - run reports and so on. Dead easy to setup and use. Can sync users from G Suite or Azure AD.

[Brimstone]

We use Securly on managed Chromebooks and PCs. Chromebook they get the extension forced and PCs/Macs the Securly SmartPAC file. This is in MAT setup. Each school has its own policies and safeguarding teams. The safeguarding teams get email alerts for sites, searches, email content and Google Docs content. the can also login and just see their schools stuff - run reports and so on. Dead easy to setup and use. Can sync users from G Suite or Azure AD.

 

Securly and Lightspeed's Relay can off site filter iOS as well.