What does it mean to be safe online? Online spaces offer incredible learning opportunities for students. But at the same time, we want to make sure students are safe as they move from one piece of content to another, or one webpage to the next. For every school and district, ensuring student online safety is non-negotiable.
It’s essential to empower both students and the adults in their lives with the tools to make informed, safe choices online. This means educating students about digital dangers, teaching them how to recognize potential risks, and fostering smart online behavior. It also means giving parents and educators the resources to guide and monitor students’ digital activity.
Today on the blog, we’ll look at what Blocksi, a powerful online safety platform, can do to help navigate online threats and implement solutions for student online safety.
Protecting Students Online
The first step in protecting student online safety is understanding the dangers they might encounter. Common online threats include cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and the dangers of phishing and malware. Being aware of these risks can help you better spot the warning signs if something goes wrong. It can also help you take proactive steps to address them.
Technology can be a powerful ally in protecting student online safety. Schools can leverage advanced monitoring solutions like Blocksi to help meet these goals. There are a handful of reasons why you might restrict websites in a school setting to meet your goal of protecting students online.
Here are three reasons why you might restrict websites:
- Protecting students from harmful content: Website restrictions can help minimize the risk of students encountering harmful content. This can include content that promotes violence, hate speech, and self-harm or dangerous behaviors.
- Preventing cyberbullying: Cyberbullying is a serious issue. Schools can use website restrictions to block social media platforms or sites where this type of harassment often occurs.
- Minimizing distractions: Although there are great educational games, other gaming and entertainment websites can distract students during the school day.
Using Blocksi to Support Students Online Safety
Blocksi is a unified school management platform with AI-adaptive YouTube and web filtering. The platform is specifically designed for K-12 teachers and students. And, additionally to the advanced filtering, they enable double K-12 threat detection, adding safety to focused learning.
Regular readers of the blog might remember this post on “7 Tips to Automate Your Classroom with AI” featuring Blocksi. I also chatted with Ernest Dixon, the Director of Customer Success at Blocksi. We talked about the connection between social-emotional learning (SEL) and personalized learning for students on a recent episode of my Easy EdTech Podcast.
Making Student Online Safety A Priority
What does double threat detection look like in action? Blocksi offers schools 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year support. There is automated device detection with real-time AI-driven threat detection for monitoring digital spaces. Users will also benefit from a context-aware alert system. The system assesses how serious an alert is and minimizes false alarms by reviewing the context of what triggered the alert.
The 24/7/365 AI-powered detection is backed by human review experts. This way your school or district is benefiting from the speed and efficiency of artificial intelligence and the confidence of having a human eye. Blocksi’s technology also responds to in-depth areas of concern. It examines and responds to indications of self-harm, threats, and even cyberbullying. If supporting student mental health and violence prevention is at the top of your list this school year, Blocksi’s student online safety can support this work.
Getting Ready To Implement Solutions For Student Safety
As you explore ways to navigate online threats in your school and district, you’ll certainly want to take a look at Blocksi. This landing page gives you more information on everything they have to offer.
And if you’d like to see Blocksi in action, use this link to schedule a demo. One of their team members will take you through the platform. This way you can get an up-close and personal view of how this tool supports common goals for ensuring student online safety.
