Safeguarding - Stay On Top of What Students View Online
The internet is a massively powerful and helpful tool to utilize.
A wealth of information on any subject imaginable lies at your fingertips – it makes sense that almost every educational institution incorporates the internet into their teaching in some way or another. However, the internet doesn’t come without a darker side, as most of us know.
With all its education, information and positive points, there is also a lot of explicit, graphic or upsetting content that can be easily stumbled upon, and has the potential to leave lasting and damaging impressions – especially on younger children who haven’t been exposed to that content before.
So what’s the solution? You’ll find that almost every authoritative or governing body of a country requires some form of safeguarding in schools, in order to protect young children from accessing harmful content. This can include filtering keywords and images, restricting access to sites, flagging attempts to violate restrictions, to name but a few controls.
What gets missed without safeguarding?
To put it simply, there is no way of effectively staying on top of protecting a student’s online safety without safeguarding software in place. With unrestricted access, children could be coming across – or even searching up – explicit and upsetting content, and exposing themselves to inappropriate images and videos.
It isn’t realistic that a teacher responsible for a class of up to around 30 children can keep an eye on every child’s computer. There is also an option to delete search history, so it may go unnoticed that children have accessed damaging and upsetting content.
How does Senso protect against harmful online content?
Senso are proud to be trailblazers of the safeguarding industry. With a vision to transform the way customers take control of their systems, Senso have created the world’s first cloud-based, modular Network and Classroom Management Solution in order to equip our customers with the autonomy and independence to manage their safeguarding strategy from both local and remote points of view. We have a few key pointers that paint the picture of what’s at the heart of our business and vision:
Keyword Libraries
We have a database of keywords, supported by leading charities in monitoring and identifying harmful content. We consistently monitor for the latest threats so that our customers feel reassured in the knowledge that our keyword database is constantly identifying new trends and adding restricted content, so that we can protect children from accessing harmful media.
Safeguarding Dashboard
Providing a rounded overview of violations made on your network, our Safeguarding Dashboard presents vital data concerning users or devices that are triggering the most violations. This is a key part of safeguarding, as it helps maintain a good level of awareness into your user’s browsing patterns. If there are repeated violations, this can indicate a user may require some private intervention to identify any behavior that would lead to this, rather than let it go unnoticed.
Logging
On a more personalized scale to our Dashboard is our Logging feature. Designed to efficiently keep track of the trends in user activity, our customers can search and sort by a multitude of categories, including user, keyword, and severity to name but a few. An effective way to ensure that trends can be reviewed for any potential safeguarding risks, our Logging feature means our customers have an efficient way to sort through selected categories in order to ensure students are safe and using the internet responsibly.
In addition, we have included context information around violations to help with determining false positives from items that would need to be raised with admins or safeguarding leads. We include screenshots, definitions of violations, even the full phrase typed in, to name just a few of the many features included.
What services do Senso offer?
We have a range of safeguarding and classroom management tools, which you can browse from the Products section of our website. Our main priorities are protecting children from accessing harmful content, and empowering our customers with the software and independence to be able to do so, and this ethos is reflected in our industry-leading technology solutions.