primary & secondary school students being safeguarded
teachers with the tools to keep students on task
school technology specialists working in tandem
Safeguarding students and defeating digital distractions on student devices
Located in West Hertfordshire, Tring is an idyllic market town situated at the edge of the Chiltern Hills. It's also home to Tring School, a secondary school with academy status serving approximately 1,500 students aged 11 to 18. Exemplified by its strong Christian ethos, Tring School attracts students from far and wide who are drawn to its close-knit community.
Also a Google Reference School, Tring School uses technology to its full advantage. All students use computers for their lessons, whether a school-issued Chromebook for Year 7 to 11 students or, optionally, their own device for older students in the sixth form. While this technology-centric approach offers numerous benefits, it also presents oversight challenges. Tring School's IT and teaching staff needed reliable and user-friendly tools to help them safeguard students and keep them focused during lessons.
Easy-to-use and integrated school web filtering, student safeguarding, and classroom management
No strangers to technology challenges, Luke Roberts, the IT Manager at Tring School, and Emma Ferris, the Digital Learning Lead and a full-time teacher of Modern Foreign Languages, teamed up to lead the search for solutions.
Luke needed a web filter that was easier to manage. The school's previous web filter required his team to create and maintain block and allow lists. Similarly, their student wellness software was basically "doing its job," but it didn't provide the context to give safeguarding staff a clear picture of student concerns.
Emma was on the hunt for a better classroom management solution, specifically a cloud-based solution that would play nicely with the school's Google environment. Equally importantly, she needed the replacement to be easy for teachers to use so the IT team wouldn't need to carry as much of the burden.
She explains, "Teachers would be asking, 'Can you check what so-and-so is doing in my lesson? Because I think they're off task, but I can't figure it out.' Or 'can you block this website for this student?' We'd got to a point where the classroom management was falling on the IT team. They had a better overview of what students were doing in our classrooms than the teachers did, and that was completely the wrong way round."
Emma and Luke found both of the solutions they needed from a single source: Securly. They were already familiar with Securly from years of attending Bett, and they were pleased to find that Securly could meet all of their needs: from web filtering and student safeguarding, to classroom management.
"The best part of Securly is that the tools are just so easy to use. It does everything we
wanted,
it looks nice, and it's quite a simple interface. And the seamless integration with Google and
Google Classroom is quite key. It makes our lives a lot easier."
—Luke Roberts, IT Manager, and Emma Ferris, Digital Technology Lead, Tring School
Teachers have the tools to keep students on task, student wellness concerns are addressed quickly, and IT demands are streamlined with easy-to-manage, cloud-based edtech tools
Luke and the IT team now have tools that are fully cloud accessible and “completely hands-off in terms of maintenance.” Having all of the tools in a single integrated platform also makes their jobs much easier.
From a safeguarding perspective, Luke shares that "the reporting Securly Aware provides on safeguarding concerns is really good. We pass that information on to our safeguarding leads, and they're very happy with the level of detail they get. They're able to act on issues quicker."
Emma and her fellow teachers have a classroom management system that's easy to use and gives them the visibility and control they need to keep students on task. Teachers can see students' device screens from their own Chromebooks and redirect them back to lesson resources when needed. They even get an email summary at the end of a lesson, which provides a list of every site a student visited.
A teacher herself, Emma is a big fan of the visibility Securly Classroom provides. "I can't look at 30 people at once; I don't actually have eyes in the back of my head. So making sure that students were on task and doing what they're supposed to be doing was my biggest challenge. Securly Classroom lets me monitor what everyone's doing all of the time."
She also loves that teachers can set up their own block lists without needing to ask IT for help. But perhaps her favorite thing is being able to use the Google Classroom Class Visit feature.
She explains, "If another teacher is absent, and I need to cover a class that I wouldn't normally teach, I can visit their Google Classroom to see what their work is, and then that pulls through into Securly Classroom automatically. So I can teach a class that is not my own in Securly Classroom without having to manually add all of the students, which would take ages otherwise for a one-off lesson. Securly just does it automatically, which is like magic."
Luke is also relieved that teachers are now empowered with tools to manage their lessons independently. He shares that, before Securly, a member of his team used to be responsible for keeping track of what students were doing on their devices.
"It was almost their full-time job keeping an eye on students throughout the whole school, which is just unfeasible. Giving teachers the ability to monitor students on their devices with Securly Classroom has been a revolution within my department," he shares.
By partnering with Securly, Tring School is:
Emma and Luke report that Tring School's governors and leadership team are positive about and supportive of their use of Securly. However, they admit that students aren't always as enthusiastic. Emma quips, “I think their favourite thing about Securly is that the extension colour changes when it's in use, so they know they need to be better behaved."
"On the whole, we've been really, really happy with Securly.”
Filter, a cloud-based web filter designed specifically for schools, helps you keep students safe with powerful features that make your school safer and your IT team happier. Get visibility into online activity, download or email reports, and block inappropriate sites instantly.
With Securly Aware, you know how your students are doing so you can focus your resources on the students who need support the most. Don't worry about your students' wellness. Know for sure with Aware.
To keep students productive and engaged in a technology-first world, teachers need simple and powerful classroom management tools that give them their power back. They can't combat what they can't see. Give them the visibility and control they need with Securly Classroom.
See for yourself how Securly Classroom helps teachers improve student engagement.
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