How to block inappropriate websites for students?

Inappropriate websites have long been a pain for teachers and as technology advances, students are beginning to find ways to access websites containing potentially harmful content. Sometimes accessing such websites may not be intentional, but they need to be blocked. Particular websites considered safe and not often blocked can also display inappropriate adverts or links, encouraging students to click.

What is classed as an inappropriate website?

According to Cyber Safety Education, “any material that is disturbing, improper, and just plain wrong for children; anything that is not normal for a child to view”, such as:

Sexually explicit content: child/adult pornography, semi-nude and/or nudity
• Images of violence/torture
• Hate groups, illegal activity and advertising
• Extremist websites: consisting of terrorist organizations, bomb-making sites, or gang affiliation
• Sites that encourage dangerous behaviour
• Use of profanity and/or vulgar language

For any teacher or parent, it is horrifying that students could potentially access these sites from their school computers. Often schools and education centres have robust internet safety policies in place to prevent this, but some could be lacking. There have been cases where software has failed, leading to students accessing inappropriate content. But not with AB Tutor.

Safeguarding students is AB Tutor’s priority. Our classroom management software has a variety of features that work holistically to not only block access to inappropriate content but keep students on task too.

Teachers are able to limit, block or close down applications instantly with AB Tutor and have the opportunity to display a warning, or attention messages. Tutors can also keep a close eye on what students are looking at, with a feature to display all computers connected within the group. Not only this, but teachers are easily able to view applications running in the background on individual computers.

Policies can either be assigned to individual users or a group. Some schools using AB Tutor create different policies depending on the age or set of a class. For younger students, more advanced internet safety policies need to be in place. As students get older, certain policies may be lifted. Another point to note is that some websites may need to be unblocked for research tasks. This can easily be done with a few clicks. Online games are a common IT project, for example. Normally topics related to online gaming would be blocked.

For certain websites, like those mentioned above, policies need to be in place for all machines across the school or education centre. AB Tutor allows policies to be applied to all machines in the network.

With our software, policies can be applied to sessions as well as devices and users in a few simple steps.

We invite you to look at how to set up a policy by viewing this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zBWz1A5hEs

If your school, college or education centre is having trouble creating policies and blocking websites for students, we’d be happy to give you a free online demonstration of our software.

You can request yours by clicking here. To view all features, click here.