Officials in Indian Prairie School District 204 are excited about the potential for a new internet filter to minimize distractions, preserve instructional time, and increase student engagement.
But students are raising concerns that the new Securly Classroom and Securly Home systems are blocking websites they’d typically be able to access, and causing fears about excessive oversight.
“I’ve seen the opposite (of increased engagement) happen when implementing it at the high school,” said Waubonsie Valley High School student Anoushka Sandeep told the school board during this week’s meeting. “Securly has changed a lot of the digital environment at our high school.”
Securly offers new internet monitoring tools
The district is implementing Securly after the expiration of the contract with its previous internet filtering service, called Lightspeed, said Rodney Mack, chief technology officer.
Mack described Securly as a monitoring tool teachers can use to create structures for technology use as students learn through district-issued Chromebooks in the classroom.
While students are in a particular teacher’s classroom — and only during that specific class time — the teacher can use a variety of strategies to monitor instruction on student devices, Mack said. Teachers can see what students are viewing, freeze screens, push certain websites to open automatically, or even limit the number of tabs students can open.
These features are already in use, and “really reducing the distractions for students,” Mack said.
“A teacher can quickly look and see — most everyone is on task, except two kids are shopping for shoes,” Mack told the school board, as he showed a screenshot recently observed by a teacher. “That’s an actual image.”
Students fear ‘continuous monitoring’
While features that push webpages to student devices or limit the number of open tabs are helpful to save “minutes of instructional time at the younger levels,” Mack said, they’re causing concerns among older students.
Sandeep said high schoolers are quickly finding a way around the “continuous monitoring” they fear could come through Securly tools.
“Students will use their home computer, and then there’s no monitoring of it at all,” she said. “I feel like that just worsens the situation.”
Sandeep also said Securly is unnecessarily blocking websites that typically would be accessible, even including the board’s previous document management site, BoardDocs.
“There are so many more sites we can’t access,” Sandeep said. “Having such a stringent policy on all of these websites that have to be blocked decreases student engagement.”
Tech team working to clear unnecessarily blocked sites
But technology administrators have solutions to the blocked website issue and say they’re actively working to address it during meetings with Securly every other week.
William “BJ” Gray, director of technology security infrastructure, said the district set up Securly to only block the same types of websites Lightspeed was blocking — sites with adult content, viruses, or malware. He said many normal websites are falling into an “uncategorized” designation and being blocked simply because the filter doesn’t know what they contain.
Gray encouraged both students and teachers to report unnecessarily blocked websites through the online support center and said the technology team will act quickly to unblock these destinations.
“We have no problem opening it up if it’s not something way out there,” Gray said.
Securly Home coming soon to monitor internet use outside school
The next step in the Securly rollout is to offer a companion product, Securly Home, to parents who want “a little more control” over how their children use district-issued chromebooks in their free time.
Mack said Securly Home allows interested parents to schedule off-times, set a bedtime, pause the internet, get weekly online activity reports and set up notifications to flag certain searches — all for each individual internet user. He said details about how to begin using Securly Home will go out to parents soon through enewsletters and during parent-teacher conferences.
IPSD to ‘be more deliberate’ about how new internet filter works
School board members advised administrators to provide more information to students about how Securly works, what teachers can monitor — and when they can monitor it — along with what to do when normal content is blocked.
“We’re stubbing our toe on some of these things,” school board member Justin Karubas said, “but maybe we need to be more deliberate about informing the students and the teachers.”
Board members said a few “growing pains” are to be expected when rolling out a new system like Securly, and they remain enthused by the filter’s potential to offer useful tools.
“I think it will be helpful,” school board President Laurie Donahue said, “it will just take time to be fully implemented.”
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