Online Safety/ Safeguarding

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.

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.

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.