[ipad] Internet and Filtering Outside School

[Miscbrah]

Hello all - having a think about some options re the above. We're Jamf School users (quite happy with it) but wanted to examine the possibility of allowing the ipads to go home with the students, just starting with one year initially.

 

I guess the main query is over filtering internet away from site. Thought I'd ask the collective how we're all doing this out in the real world. I started looking into the timed profiles within Jamf school, but I'm put off by reliability concerns. Did have the wild idea about making the Smoothwall externally facing and filtering via that, but I'm not sure how graceful that'd be.

 

Very grateful for any/all solutions. Also will be grateful for a summary of how well whatever solution works, or indeed anything on the experience of ipads being taken away from site. Do they come back? Do they help with any learning realistically? Any horror/success stories and pitfalls in general?

 

Thanks everyone for any thoughts.

[Brimstone]

Firstly don't expect Jamf School to have any real filtering or content blocking, timed profiles are really only designed to allow students access to certain apps, sites and social media when outside of school and this works very well.

 

As a Jamf School user you could opt for Jamf Safe Internet which from an admin point of view is very easy to use and deploy, bear mind that unless you are in a 1:1 senario you can not identify the iPad end user and whilst JSI provides great content blocking for both web and App content, Google Safe Search, YouTube Safe Restrictions

it does not have any browser keyword monitoring capabilities. I'd get a trial from your Jamf reseller to test this.

[MartinT]

There is only so much you can do. Our senior students take their iPads home as they own them. We inform the parents constantly about retaining an adult content filter in their internet feed and also mobile contracts for the students. Some listen while others don't.

 

When the iPads come back to school, sometimes the student will have left a dodgy tab open in their browser, Smoothwall will pick up on it in the safeguarding report and we report such violations to the DSL.

[DGardiner]

Hello all - having a think about some options re the above. We're Jamf School users (quite happy with it) but wanted to examine the possibility of allowing the ipads to go home with the students, just starting with one year initially.

 

I guess the main query is over filtering internet away from site. Thought I'd ask the collective how we're all doing this out in the real world. I started looking into the timed profiles within Jamf school, but I'm put off by reliability concerns. Did have the wild idea about making the Smoothwall externally facing and filtering via that, but I'm not sure how graceful that'd be.

 

Very grateful for any/all solutions. Also will be grateful for a summary of how well whatever solution works, or indeed anything on the experience of ipads being taken away from site. Do they come back? Do they help with any learning realistically? Any horror/success stories and pitfalls in general?

 

Thanks everyone for any thoughts.

If you use smoothwall, get in touch with your account manager and get the cloud filter setup (its included in your onprem licence), deploy the smoothwall browser with the configs relevant to your environment and then disable safari on the devices - Filtered internet off and on site!

[TheHyperTechie]

We have 1:1 chromebooks for years 5 & 6. We filter them at home using RMSafetyNet Go. It copies the the top level (on-site) policy and applies it to the Google users (students) we pull through. So they have the same policy and filtering level applied at school and at home. I saw recently that they released a version for IOS which I believe can be deployed using JAMF school (if that is your MDM).

 

I believe there are quite a few companies offering this kind of solution at the moment, (Senso, Securly etc)

[mrstrong]

If you use smoothwall, get in touch with your account manager and get the cloud filter setup (its included in your onprem licence), deploy the smoothwall browser with the configs relevant to your environment and then disable safari on the devices - Filtered internet off and on site!

 

how does that work re reporting, (our users don't sign into ipads). Does it just block a site and report the IP ?

[DGardiner]

how does that work re reporting, (our users don't sign into ipads). Does it just block a site and report the IP ?

 

check the KB, theres a few options, the browser has a few different configs you can sate to change how stuff works.

 

Ours are shared ipads so i make the browser force login and it stores the ID in the pupils cloud storage so they never have to login again (as they log into the ipad)

 

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404006049810-Installing-Cloud-Filter-for-iOS

 

you could make it identify the ipad in the config so reporting would say which ipad also, probably one to discuss with the engineers at setup time