School broadband filtering is becoming ever more important with accessibility to inappropriate sites and apps becoming easier for students. This is why filtering is so important in a school environment. Creating the right balance between an overzealous filtering system, which blocks access to much needed sites, and a filtering system which is sophisticated enough to ensure complete protection is key to modern school broadband services.
IcyTea’s filtering software works on any device regardless of where that device is used. For example, if a student is given a laptop to take home to work on, or if your school provides iPads or Chromebooks to students as a study tool, the filtering will still work at home – ensuring they stay protected. The Covid lockdowns certainly stimulated the move for students studying more from home, however this will always be a reality with homework and self-study being a brilliant way for students to enhance learning outside of school hours. So, it’s vital that this is done in a safe manner!
Let’s go into some of the specific benefits that our filtering provides to the schools we work with:
Key advantages of Filtering
- Easy set up: Get set up in 15 minutes. No hardware.
- Available on all devices: Chromebooks, Macs, iPads and Windows. No matter the device the Filter supports any operating system.
- Stay up-to-date with our fully Cloud solution: no bulky hardware, software crashes, agents, or network bottlenecks.
- Almost-infinitely scalable: filter your traffic to virtually unlimited amounts of bandwidth and concurrent connections.
- Unlimited data retention
- 90 days of searchable data bandwidth and concurrent connections and unlimited data retention
- Live activity feed: know your students’ online activity. Our pioneering visual audit trail makes it easy to see favicons, exact searches, and video thumbnails at a glance.
- Seamless authentication: Google, Azure, and Active Directory authentication using G Suite or Office 365.
Features of our broadband filtering
AI-based context analysis
Using AI we are able to filter monitors for signs of cyberbullying, troubling behaviour and inappropriate content across social networking and web searches. If a student is suffering or looking at concerning content, you’ll know.
Selective SSL decryption
Virtually eliminate performance issues and security concerns with our one-of-a-kind approach to web filtering and decrypting secure web traffic.
AI-flagged alerts and granular reporting
Sophisticated AI alerts and activity reports going to the right people.
Shared reporting
You will have quickly downloadable reports available and scheduled when required or email reports can be delivered too.
Flagged alerts
The filter analyses searches and sites visited with the longest-learning AI on the market. Our separate flagged activity feed lets you focus on the concerning trends at your school.
Filtering that works from Pupils Homes too
Customisable, unparalleled parental control. When school laptops and tablets are taken home, the same filtering will take place as on school premises.
In addition to creating your own policies, customisable Take-Home and Guest policies come included with Filter to make sure the right devices and people are filtered and protected, all the time.
Parental controls
Give parents control over their child’s school device when it goes home so they can view their child’s online activity, ‘pause’ the internet, and set their own filtering rules. When it comes to granting control for parent access, you hold the key.
Policy map and custom groups
The policy map makes it easy to move Organisational Units (OUs) from one policy to another and create custom groups for a pre-set amount of time to allow or deny access — all without needing Google or Microsoft Azure directories.
Secure and reliable broadband
Let IcyTea create safe connections for your business. Let’s chat!