Student Safety on the Internet

[Sarah Krause]

Hello All,
This question came up on our WELS school admin mail group.

Good evening! I hope that email finds you well. I am looking into getting GoGuardian for our chromebook devices at our school. The price has inflated significantly since I had last used this product. The Education Committee would like to wait to purchase this product and implement it in 2024 for budget purposes. They wanted me to explore any temporary options to fit our needs in the meantime. Is there any knowledge of other companies/products available out there that would provide a preventative measure of protection for students on the internet? Are there other products that I should be considering instead of GoGuardian? Any knowledge shared or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

- Ethan Doble
Christ Lutheran School Eagle River

[Steve Daley]

Our network is currently protected by a Sonicwall Firewall. At the Firewall we have filtering/blocking of DNS requests(requests to a specific website name or directly to the web server's public IP address). So if a student attempts to connect to a website that has questionable content, the web browser will fail to connect to the site. This has been in place for a year, and so far I have not seen or heard of any cases where students were able to access content that is questionable like pornography. Since the firewall does keep logs of traffic, I can filter those logs down to specific devices and can identify devices as cell phones or Chromebooks and I have with the record the MAC address of the network card in the computer, phone, or Chromebook. There are other brands of firewalls that offer this same functionality, and even some firewalls you can build, install, and maintain yourself that offer similar functionality.

If you firewall does not have filtering, you can set up something like Pi-Hole (https://pi-hole.net) that offers all of the functionality that I just mentioned that we get through Sonicwall Firewall, but you would have to maintain and update regularly the Pi-Hole program. The program is free to use, and can be installed on other computers besides a raspberry pi. Although it is advertised as an ad blocker, there are free block lists that you can use to block pornography and you can even block individual domains like blocking all access to YouTube.com.

One great advantage of the above solutions is that they apply network wide to every device that attaches to the network. Which means all staff computers will also have these protections in place as well. Of course, you may want to block some websites from the students, but you would like to allow those websites for staff, this is harder, you would need to have the networking equipment (usually an advanced firewall/router) that you can set up with virtual networks or hardwired networks that separate student devices from staff devices.

One final solution that I can offer which is also free is setting up your DNS requests to go through Cloudflare's "Family Friendly" DNS servers. This is what I do at my home. My firewall/router uses the Family Friendly Cloudflare DNS servers instead of our ISP's (Xfinity Cable Internet) DNS servers. If anyone in my home attempts to go to a questionable site the web browser just fails to connect to that site.

Although I have used both Pi-Hole and Cloudflare's which are both free at home, and I'm very happy with both products, on our church and school network, I felt more comfortable having a firewall/router that was designed and is automatically updated to filter school internet traffic, but it did cost I think around $1500 for a three year license for the size of our network, and it was installed by a local MSP (Managed Service Provider) who has done this for a few schools in the area. Reach out if you have additional questions.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pastor Stephen Daley
St. Paul Lutheran Church and School

718 Arbor Ct.

South Haven, MI 49090

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WELSTech" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to welstech+u...@groups.wels.net.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/groups.wels.net/d/msgid/welstech/1efa353e-c989-42e2-a033-5d915e72edb9n%40groups.wels.net.