If you’re a district or school IT administrator, you’re familiar with the role of a school web filter. Web filtering is an essential component of K-12 student safety, ensuring your students are protected from online content that’s distracting, inappropriate, or harmful.
Despite the critical role web filters play, their administration and management shouldn’t be a time drain. Yet, with so many demands continually competing for your attention, you may not realize how much of your time is being spent managing filter issues and requests.
Here are five tell-tale signs that your web filter is requiring more of your time than it should be.
#1: Your School Web Filter Doesn’t Support All Student Devices
Chromebooks, iPads, laptops, and other devices are often used simultaneously within a single school or district. Students may also use their own devices – “BYOD” – that need to be filtered.
Your school web filter should be able to support all of these devices, while simultaneously providing a seamless user experience, and simplifying authentication and reporting. If it doesn’t have these capabilities, you’re almost certainly spending more time on your web filter than you need to.
For example, if you support iOS devices like Macs or iPads (or may need to in the future), you need a filter that can handle typical iOS web filtering challenges. For example, if your web filter can’t support user-level reporting without requiring the student to log in, you can’t easily support younger students who can’t be expected to remember and enter login credentials. You’re faced with either wasting time on workarounds, or requiring your teachers to take on the burden of helping students log in.
#2: You’re Getting Too Many False Positive Alerts
False positive alerts occur when web filtering software incorrectly identifies content as inappropriate or harmful. With an estimated 576,000 new sites cropping up every single day, it’s nearly impossible for a web filter to know what’s safe and what isn’t. But your web filter shouldn’t be inundating you with false alarms either.
When a filter’s algorithms are prohibitively aggressive, often because they lack more sophisticated filtering methods, it will incorrectly flag harmless content as inappropriate. For example, if your web filter is relying predominantly on keyword matching to identify and block harmful content, it’s producing a disproportionate number of false alerts because it isn’t able to take context into account.
Looking at a student’s blocked sites and searches is one thing, but having a filter that integrates with a student wellness monitoring system is a must, as it allows you to see a more complete picture of that student’s online activity. Understanding a student’s online activity patterns is key to triaging students who are demonstrating signals of distress, providing critical insight into students who need immediate intervention.
You’re also getting more false alerts than you should be if your web filter isn’t providing the capabilities district and school IT administrators need, including:
- Allowing customization of block/allow lists
- Supporting multiple filter policies at the same time
- Continuously scanning new websites and automatically updating block lists
#3: You Can’t Customize Filter Policies for Teachers’ Needs
Not all web filters provide the same level of flexibility and customization options. For example, you shouldn’t have to choose between blocking a site completely for all of your users or not at all. If your web filter requires this, odds are you’re spending too much time addressing site access requests.
If your school web filter doesn’t support easy creation of custom user groups, each with their own block/allow lists and access policies, you’re not only spending more time fiddling around with your filter than you should be, you’re also lacking a key filter requirement for K-12 environments.
Similarly, if your teachers aren’t able to block or allow site access during class themselves or have delegated access to self-manage their reporting and other needs, you have no choice but to drop what you’re working on to help them in the moment.
#4: You Don’t Have the Website-level Control You Need
When a site is obviously harmful or inappropriate, such as a gambling or pornography site, the choice to block it entirely is easy. But some websites aren’t that straightforward.
YouTube is a perfect example. While there are plenty of distracting and inappropriate videos on YouTube, it also offers a lot of educational content that your teachers want to use in their lessons.
If your school web filter doesn’t give you granular control over YouTube settings, you have to make a one-size-fits-all block/allow decision. You’re probably also spending unnecessary time and effort figuring out some complicated workaround to give the right access only to the right people.
#5: Your Web Filter Provider Doesn’t Provide Responsive Technical Support
Support isn’t always top of mind when you’re first evaluating edtech tools. But it can make a world of difference when it comes to saving time and headaches after implementation.
If your web filter provider doesn’t have dedicated technical experts available when you need them to help you resolve issues or answer questions, you’re spending more time than you should trying to figure everything out for yourself.
If Managing Your School Web Filter Is Taking Too Much Time, Maybe It’s Time to Make a Change
If you’re experiencing any of these tell-tale signs, don’t blame yourself. The problem isn’t you; it’s your web filter.
When your web filter is purpose-built for your needs as a district or school IT administrator, you don’t need to waste hours each week on it.
Securly Filter was the first cloud-based web filter designed specifically for K-12 schools. Today, Securly continues to lead the way in making the internet safer for students and making edtech management easier for IT administrators. To learn more, visit www.securly.com/filter.
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