The La Porte Community School Corporation is introducing Securly, a program that will help parents and teachers track their students’ online activities. Photo illustration by Amanda Haverstick
La PORTE — The La Porte Community School Corporation is introducing a new program to help parents and teachers better monitor their students’ online activities.
The program, Securly, allows the school corporation to assist families and teachers when parents have questions as to how their children are using their school-issued Chromebooks.
LPCSC director of Technology Services Michael Walthour explained to the School Board that Securly was adopted in the fall. It replaces Lightspeed, which had been in use for three to four years.
“One of the things that was big on our plate was the fact that we have so many students outside of the school district that are using the filtering and being filtered remotely,” Walthour said.
All web traffic will go through Securly, he said, and the program allows the district to have deeper filters on apps such as YouTube.
“As far as filtering goes, we’ve got a lot more capability on our side and a lot more transparency for us to be able to see what students are doing,” Walthour said.
One of the benefits of the program is that it’s cloud-based.
“We no longer house this internally on our own server. If we lose power ... they don’t lose filtering capabilities,” Walthour said.
In the past two weeks, the school district has sent out correspondence to parents about the new program.
Parents and guardians will soon be receiving an email with a link to the app, available in the Apple and Android stores, for their smartphone or tablet.
From the app, parents can see their child’s web searches, as well as a list of websites their children have visited. Parents can also choose to receive an email summary at the end of each week.
Securly also has an option where parents can shut the internet off to their child’s Chromebook at a certain time.
“There’s some more functionality that parents can see. They can also sign up for a web report every week. At the end of every week, they get a digest in their email of what the student has done,” Walthour said.
Teachers in the school district have been given access to Securly’s classroom tool. With that, they can better assist students and monitor activity during class time, both remotely and in the physical classroom, he said.
“If they want the kids to pay attention to the lesson, they can lock the screens remotely. If they are teaching a distance class, they can actually broadcast themselves. (It’s) kind of like a Zoom session, but is more of a one-way Zoom,” Walthour said.
The program’s online console allows teachers to steer all Chromebooks in a classroom, or an individual student, through online instruction. Additionally, the program allows teachers to monitor issues the student may be having.
“The teachers can lock the kids into certain sites. If there is a kid that is maybe getting off task, they’re able to see what the kid has been doing on the Chromebook and they can actually see screenshots of the screen at any one time,” Walthour said.
“It gives them the capability of controlling things easier,” he said, adding that they’ve received good feedback from teachers.
While the program increases the ability to track student internet use for violations, Walthour said they also want to stress the importance of parent and guardian involvement the student’s online life at school and at home.
“All of this is great technology. It also is a great way of giving teaching points,” Walthour said.
“You constantly monitor, but you also have an opportunity to go, ‘I know you searched for this, but what were you really searching for?’ It’s a good learning moment for both parents and students.”
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