With BYOD and 1-2-1 laptop programs main stream in our Australian schools, there is a lot of responsibility placed on college’s to ensure that their students are protected by Child Online Safety policies, even away from the campus.
For a number of years we have seen solutions, or ‘agents’, where the College deploys a filtering platform, which might offer a degree of protection when students are using the Internet and Social Media at home. The level of administrative overhead and overall reliability of these technologies has been hit and miss for success due to the types of differing devices, reliability and overall complexity.
Meet Circle with Disney which caught our attention and is worth a look.
Circle with Disney have partnered with CyberHound, who provide one of the leading student safety platforms for education. Circle by Disney isn’t just an app that can be easily bypassed.
First off, lets start with the setup. 5 minutes, wireless – done.
What really makes this special is how well thought out it is. From a technical view, what they call their “special sauce” is some pretty cool technology using ARP Spoofing. So under the hood it is pretty cool, but what else?
Value add, it is well thought out. Centrally controlled it offers the mandatory filtering for online safety. But here is where it offers just that bit more through Screen Time and Bed Time, so that screen time can be limited for the kids.
Homework completed early? Use the reward option to provide them with more screen time if desired.
We mentioned it was easy to setup and that it just ‘taps in’ to your Wireless Network, but what if the kids unplug it to bypass it? Well, there is even a battery backup built in to cover that. Smart, it’s well thought through.
Circle Go just rounds out the picture to offer all of the above, but for devices connected to other wifi or 4G networks when away from the home Wireless Network.
More information can be found specifically for Australia at the CyberSafeHouse website over here.
