
Online Safety/ Safeguarding
Monitor concerning activity
Identify students at risk
Spot online safety trends
Boost digital citizenship and wellbeing
Fulfill online safety requirements
Keeping all your students safe as they learn online can be a challenge, but things just got easier! classroom.cloud’s online safety tools helps keep your online environment safe at all times, by monitoring concerning activity, identifying students at risk and spotting online safety trends. These powerful tools are perfect for helping inform your online safety strategy/policies, and meeting the latest requirements.
Keyword monitoring
By monitoring the online safety keywords and phrases your students type, your school can gain an insight into any trending issues, as well as identify individual students who are engaged in concerning activity.
The keyword monitoring tool is powered by a pre-supplied online safety database of keywords and phrases, containing over 14,000 terms! The database covers a wide range of topics from self-harm, gambling, bullying, and racism – to risks of radicalization, drugs, sexual exploitation, and more. Triggered events/keywords can also be deleted (if a false-positive for example) with the action recorded as an entry in the Audit Log.
Language packs: Several language packs are included to ensure your school can monitor concerning activity in students’ first languages. Slang terms are also taken into account, which can be crucial in intercepting inappropriate communications of young people who can sometimes appear to have their own language!
Updating and sharing your keywords: We update the database regularly with new terms because, as we all know, it's an ever-changing landscape. To help with this, classroom.cloud not only gives you the power to add your own keywords to the database that are relevant to your school and community - and even share them across your District/Trust, but can also share them with us if you want to! That way you can help all schools be as safe as possible by working together with us to provide the most up-to-date and relevant keywords to help keep all of our children safe.
Word cloud of trending topics
When a keyword or phrase is triggered from something a student has typed, copied, or searched for, it populates a word cloud. This is a nice easy way to spot trending topics. Click on any word in the cloud and you can see a full explanation and definition to help you understand the potential risk, along with a detailed list of instances where it has been triggered by your students.
Capturing concerning activity
In addition to populating the word cloud, each triggered keyword is also captured immediately as an ‘event’. And according to how severe these are, staff can view them as a simple text record (low severity), a screenshot of the screen, or a screen recording (high severity). For all events, you can review information including details such as student name, the device being used, and the time it took place, along with the Risk Index analysis…
The contextual intelligence-based Risk Index helps your school determine the severity of triggered events and ensures you can quickly and easily identify and support vulnerable students.
It works like this: The Risk Index assesses the context and history of a student’s current activities (the device used, time of day, websites visited and applications used) and considers them alongside any previous alerts they may have triggered. From this information, it creates a risk index number that is applied to the event. So, if a student has repeatedly researched an online safety topic (e.g. suicide) out of hours, in an unmonitored setting such as the library, a high risk index could result. A lower index rating could come from a student searching a lower risk keyword in a local application during school hours that may have been used for curriculum topics.
You can configure email alerts to inform the appropriate staff when students trigger a monitored keyword or phrase – and the online safety tab gives you an easy-to-see overview of when new triggers occur.
(Click to view image of updating triggered events)
(Click to view image of online safety email alerts)
Keeping track of events
New events are flagged on the online safety tab of the web portal so that you can see immediately how many phrase matches have been identified and are ready for review.
To help staff to keep track of which triggers need reviewing (or to let supporting staff know where to pick up when you are on holiday), all new events are highlighted as being 'new' – and, as you review them, they can be marked as 'in progress' or 'complete'. You can also add notes and enter details of any follow-up actions. In addition, you can print, save, or email details of a triggered event, or forward a screengrab of the results to a co-worker to follow up on.
Plus, if staff have access to multiple sites, they can now view triggered events across all of them at once (if selected), making it even quicker to find and support those in need.
Integration with MYCONCERN and CPOMS: For schools with a MYCONCERN or CPOMS account, you can now directly integrate it with classroom.cloud. This means that when you’re reviewing a triggered event, you can link it to a student in your MYCONCERN or CPOMS account – and you can continue to view the event in both classroom.cloud and in MYCONCERN and CPOMS.
Choose your monitoring settings
The last thing anyone wants when monitoring online digital safety is false alarms. So, to help you reduce these, you can also choose whether to exclude certain applications and websites from being monitored. So, for example, if students are using PowerPoint or Excel, you could exempt them from monitoring so you can focus on more high-risk areas.
Integration with Microsoft Teams: You can choose to connect the school’s Microsoft 365 tenancy so you can monitor Teams Chats, Channels, and more. And in the same way, you can exclude selected channels and users from monitoring, such as teachers’ chats. The filtering of Teams groups has been enhanced to make it easier to find the group you would like to monitor for online safety purposes.
Blur images: When reviewing a triggered event, if you are concerned about exposing a staff member to pictures that might offend, you can choose to blur any images or screenshots. The blurring of images can also help events to be reviewed sensitively with students.
Online Safety Groups: These can be created to deliver focused monitoring of, for example, specific year groups or students considered vulnerable. Specific settings can be applied to each group of student devices. Specific settings can be applied to each group of student devices, and you will now be able to specify the online safety user who should receive alerts for any triggers made by students who are members of the specified groups. You can also group and filter the keyword/phrase list and any concerns reported by students by online safety group.
Empower students
Report a concern: Students can now report a concern by sending a message in confidence to a trusted member of staff. (Android support coming soon). You can select staff to be ‘Concern contacts’ and they will automatically receive an email that confirms the concern logged by a student in classroom.cloud. You can also choose additional staff members to receive the emails who aren't a primary ‘Concern contact,’ such as those who might need to monitor the issues being reported by students, such as a Headteacher or School Principal.
Custom concern categories: When online safety staff review a concern, they can assign it to a category. They can use the default keyword categories or add their own to be more specific about the issue, for example if the concern is about a wellbeing issue (our brand-new keyword category), a new more specific category such as ‘Depression’ or 'Domestic Abuse' could be assigned to it – this is handy when reviewing what type of concerns are being reported.
Online resources: Students have instant access to a range of validated online support resources, including details of helplines and charities (covering topics such as FGM, drug addiction, grooming, and bullying), enabling them to explore wellbeing issues on their terms. Staff can also manage the pre-populated list and add any additional resources they feel are appropriate.
Keeping things super secure
The very nature of online digital safety means that it’s a sensitive area that requires confidentiality.
Staff access levels: To help, classroom.cloud allows schools to set up two levels of staff access: Online Safety Admins (giving full access to the tools and events) and Online Safety Users (who can only see triggered keywords and phrases). This ensures only authorized members of staff can access the details of triggered incidents and control the online safety settings.
Monitoring hours: Your school can also specify when you want the students to be monitored, for example, only during school hours or at all times when the student is using their school device or on the school network.

As a previous local authority Service Manager for 360 schools I have been a fan of the use of behaviour management and monitoring software since the earliest days; as an online safety specialist working in schools nationally for the last 11 years I know how vital these tools can be as an additional tool to safeguard children and young people. Recently I had the opportunity to take a deep-dive into classroom.cloud; tools such as this need to be easy to use and managed by non-technical people, equally they need to be able to fit the particular and diverse needs of individual schools. Overall, I was left very impressed, particularly in relation to the granularity of management options which can be tailored to fit individual school requirements and its ease of use. If tailored to fit the individual needs of the school and used correctly, classroom.cloud will be a significant benefit to safeguarding students.
Why our online safety tools are super effective…
Expertly created
We’ve gone all out to make classroom.cloud’s online digital safety toolkit the best in the business! We work with School Counselors/Safeguarding Leads, Local Authorities, the Internet Watch Foundation, leading charities, and young people themselves to ensure the tools are relevant, effective, and most importantly, up to date and secure.
Building students’ Digital Citizenship skills
Powered by Contextual Intelligence
With clever use of contextual intelligence, classroom.cloud gives schools valuable help when it comes to spotting students at risk. Its contextual intelligence-based Risk Index automatically alerts you to high-risk events and vulnerable students, based on the context and history of their activities – allowing you to prioritize genuinely high-risk alerts.
Helping you work with online safety guidelines
Schools everywhere have a duty of care to their students and that means following a range of online safety legal requirements and guidance. We designed classroom.cloud with these in mind, to help make your job easier!
(UK Prevent Duty, Department for Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education [KCSiE], Children’s Internet Protection Act [CIPA] and more).
Policies and requirements (USA/International)
- ISTE standards
- CIPA standards
- ESSER Funding
- California – Seth’s Law
- New York – Dignity Act
- North Carolina – Bully Prevention Legislation
- Oklahoma – Safety and Bullying Prevention Act
- Florida – Jeff’s Law
- New Mexico – Safe Schools for All Students Act
- Texas – David’s Law
- Washington – Anti-Bullying Legislation
- Colorado – Anti-bullying Legislation
- Ohio – Jessica Logan Act
Policies and requirements (UK)
Other helpful resources
Online Safety – Trends and Tips Panel Discussion
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