Cloud based web filtering & web-analytics engine purpose built for K-12 schools designed to provide seamless web filtering service for chromebook filtering and take home iPad.
Delivered through the cloud, Securly provides both in-school and take-home filtering through the same admin console.
Zero-touch filtering of 1:1 take home Chromebooks using a Chrome extension that takes seconds to deploy. No proxying. No SSL certificates.
Support for any heterogeneous mix of 1:1 devices including iPads, Windows, Macs, and Android/Nexus tablets.
Location based policies for take-home 1:1 devices when the devices are off school premises.
Securly's cloud architecture consists of a core policy engine that can be deployed either as a DNS-service, Proxy, or plugin. This means, for in-school filtering, admins can use a DNS forwarder setting and have the entire district be setup for in-school filtering in under 5-minutes. For take-home Chromebooks, our Chrome Web Store plugin can be pushed down for ubiquitous coverage within 60 seconds. Likewise, for iPads, Windows, Macs, and other devices, you can use the MDM of your choice to push down Proxy PAC file or DNS settings within minutes. All of these devices are then policed by the same central cloud-based policing engine through a unified admin console.
Safe Search and YouTube:
Admins can optionally enforce the safety-mode on Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines. For YouTube, schools can have an open but safe environment where videos flagged by the YouTube community are filtered out.
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and Social media sites like YouTube have become necessary tools of instruction in the 21th century classroom. These are often the first places a student would go to while researching a class project. However, as an educator, you are all too aware of the perils that unfiltered access to these tools can bring. An innocuous search term can end up as a major classroom distraction. Securly forces on safety mode in Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube. Any attempts to turn off safety mode will be intercepted and blocked by Securly. On top of the safety-modes of these sites, we use our own dictionary of unsafe keywords to determine if a search should be allowed or not. Further, we also block a long list of other unsafe search engines and social media sites.
School Focused Filter Categories:
Handpicked categories that make sense for Schools. Admins are not overwhelmed by enterprise categories such as Radio, Television, Humor!
Per User Policies:
Through the GApps Single Sign On, Securly provides policies mapped to individual Organizational Units.
Granular White & Black Lists:
White and Black lists can be created for entire district, individual schools or even individual Org Units.
Whitelist-only Mode:
Admins can create whitelisted environments for certain Org Units (e.g. for online tests or elementary students) for added security.
Safe Social Media:
Securly filters out unsafe pages social media sites such as blogs and wikipedia.
Social media sites by-definition contain user-uploaded content. This content can frequently be uncurated and therefore inappropriate for safe use in schools. Nevertheless, educators feel compelled to introduce students to the power of tools such as Wikipedia and blogging services (Tumblr, Weebly etc). Securly allows admins to block individual pages on such sites while allowing the rest of the site. We use a list of 1000s of low noise keywords to look for unsafe pages on such sites.
Google Apps for Education Integration:
Securly allows GAfE based SSO and per-OrgUnit policies.
Securly was the first filter to provide Single Sign On using Google Apps for Education accounts. Schools using Active Directory or LDAP based directories can use the free Google Apps Directory Sync (GADS) tool to get onto GAfE. Students, teachers and admins are administered policies customized for their Organizational Units and the login is based on their GAfE accounts.
Teacher Centric Features:
Admins can allow teachers to temporarily or permanently whitelist individual sites as exceptions to an entire blocked category.
Teachers occassionally run into useful websites blocked by an otherwise inappropriate category. For example, a teacher may want to demo blogging using Tumblr in the classroom. Instead of having to ask the admin to unblock Tumblr, if the admin has allowed teacher whitelisting for that Org Unit, the teacher can simply whitelist the site herself. The teachers whitelist the site for the entire school this way. The admin can configure whether such whitelist should be temporary or permanent. Further, admins always see an audit log of which teacher whitelisted what site for accountability.
For more in-depth details you can visit us at http://www.securly.com/
