The pressure on schools to manage the growing speed and scope of online student risks has reached a critical point.
District and school administrators and IT leaders are struggling to navigate a digital landscape that holds increasing online dangers for students, including online grooming, cyberbullying, and exposure to explicit content. Student safety and wellbeing is at crisis levels - inextricably linked to the surge in negative online behaviors and interactions.
Amid these challenges, digital threat detection solutions have become essential K-12 resources, working alongside web filtering to keep students safe in the digital world. As much as educators recognize the need for these digital monitoring tools, districts often face challenges when implementing such solutions.
Through our own journey of continuous learning and adaptation, we have distilled our experience into seven comprehensive standards for digital monitoring, which K-12 leaders can use to guide the strategy and decision-making around solutions for your district.
These standards empower you to navigate the complex landscape of digital safety and student wellbeing with confidence, while avoiding the most common pitfalls and challenges.
An effective digital monitoring solution should equip your school staff with “virtual eyes and ears,” revealing invisible risks, and alerting the right staff members in real time to threats to student safety.
While digital monitoring provides critical support for student safety, one of the main concerns is the occurrence of “false positives”—alerts that are triggered by benign activities.
For example, a student might research something related to an academic assignment, like the use of weapons in a historical context, and this could be mistakenly flagged by monitoring technology as a threat.
Sorting through these false positives is time-consuming for school staff members who are already stretched thin with other responsibilities.
Many monitoring solutions raise considerations about how student information is stored and shared, which can make some schools hesitant to adopt these tools. The right monitoring solution must not only detect risks but also ensure that student data privacy is handled with the utmost care and confidentiality.
In many cases, digital monitoring solutions are managed by the IT department, as they fall into the EdTech. While your network admin and other IT staff are skilled in managing technology infrastructure, they are not typically the ones responsible for responding to risks to student safety.
If your school’s mental health and wellbeing staff are reliant on IT to access or gather reporting details for digital monitoring alerts, it creates inefficiencies that delay critical interventions.
Schools need solutions that allow mental health professionals to act swiftly on student safety risks, without needing to go through IT; while still ensuring IT has full oversight of the technology used.
As the need for digital monitoring in schools grows, it’s essential to adopt solutions that meet the needs of both the IT team and student support teams, while also ensuring high ethical standards.
In our downloadable guide, we’ve outlined seven comprehensive standards that schools can follow to implement digital monitoring in a way that is both effective and responsible.
These standards help K-12 districts to avoid common pitfalls and establish a framework for using digital monitoring solutions effectively, as part of a comprehensive student safety strategy. As always, the goal is to create a safe and supportive environment where students can thrive.
Download the full guide for in-depth insights.