Students hotspotting to avoid firewall

[dmj]

I previously came from an independent day school and Students having mobile phones in their possession at all was a firm 'no'.

However, Laptops were permitted and connected to the main school WiFi (no proper BYOD network back then).

 

presumably the bigger the computer, the better the educational experience?

[Guest Guest]

presumably the bigger the computer, the better the educational experience?

 

Ha! I didn't get involved with the politics nor reasonings behind the decision. I always thought mobile phones should've been sanctioned due to the eLearning benefits. You could do a lot more 'damage' with an actual proper computer (and, as you would expect - most of them were MacBook Air's/Pro's); so their argument of 'we don't want to be liable if things get broken' didn't stand up well w/ parents when it was found that mobile phones were banned yet more expensive devices weren't. Suppose that's private schools for you!

[jmak]

There are plenty of ways to manage BYOD.

However, if BYOD is a problem a simple solution is not to allow BYOD.

What can you do without installing an MDM to restrict which wi-fi networks a personally owned device can connect to?

 

I know you can force filtering by mandating installation of a certificate if the device connects to the school's wi-fi. But as far as I'm aware, you can't control what other networks a device connects to.

 

For me, the options are policy and behaviour management, not technical. If I was running a private school (about as likely as me becoming Queen) I'd put the bill up by £150/year and buy 1:1 devices and then have complete control of them.

[TechMonkey]

As ever, and has been mentioned, this isn't a technical issue, it is an educational issue. The school needs to educate the parents to make sure they haven't blindly turned off the mobile provider default filters and of the dangers of giving children unlimited data; educate the pupils about responsibility when browsing and using the Internet; educate staff to know what to look for. As an IT team you need to make sure your Wi-Fi/Internet is more attractive, or at least not less attractive, than hot-spotting.

If your network or internet is slow, they will work round it. If your filtering is too aggressive, they will go around it.

 

Personally I am against banning mobile phones. I feel that in school it is a good opportunity to learn appropriate use, but it does bring challenges and they are what the school need to meet.

 

BYOD does bring its own set of challenges, as does school owned 1:1 devices, and the School needs to be fully aware of the pros and cons before starting down the path of either, or when evaluating if the path they took is still appropriate for what the School wants.

[Alis_Klar]

So you can't deploy non-removable PAC files because the Global HTTP proxy MDM payload requires Supervision. Damn! Maybe your BYOD policy needs to demand that all personal student devices have to be supervised before they can touch your network. Harsh and loads of work for you but that is only way to enforce filtering on iPads.

 

You don't need deploy any other restrictions (you could )

 

SecURLy SmartPAC claims to have you covered for filtering on any network:

 

https://support.securly.com/hc/en-us/articles/225774268-How-do-I-configure-Securly-filtering-on-iPads-

 

https://support.securly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291568-How-to-filter-Bring-Your-Own-Devices-BYOD-