As EdTech, online learning, collaborative classrooms, flipped classrrooms, and elearning continue to take off, the need for content monitoring has increased. Long are the days when a teacher or administrator can go to town with a free ip address blocker and call it a day.

As more and more students start school, who basically grew up with the internet, it’s getting harder to filter things at school. Now we’re definitely not advocates of censorship in any way shape or form but their are sites and content that are great for the classroom and school environment and there are other sites and content which should be up to the student and their parents.

In the classroom though, teachers and administrators need to be able to trust that their students are actually using the internet for the task at hand. Whether they’re reading a chapter of a  book online or researching quantum physics, teachers need the piece of mind that students are working and not checking their Facebook messages. Other students, who are trying to learn, deserve this right too.

The IP blocker only goes so far, and sometimes it blocks out too much. That’s why theirs smoothwall. Smoothwall delivers all the web you want without the web you don’t.

Smoothwall is about content awareness. The smoothwall system allows administrators and teachers to block URLs, but it also allows teachers to block content types with content filtering and hundreds of categories. Content filtering allows sites to be accessed, but for only the right content.

Take Wikipedia for example. Wikipedia can be a vast resource for students in just about any grade level. However, a determined student can look up anything from sex, to drugs, to guns and more within Wikipedia. If a school was using an IP blocker and decided not to block Wikipedia that content would be a students’ for the taking. With content filtering the user can customize smoothwall to block things like sex, or drugs but allow other things like Native American Indian Tribes, thus allowing students access to Wikipedia without worrying what they are looking at.

Smoothwall isn’t a one and done solution. If a teacher or administrator discovers they may have missed something in their filtering there’s a very easy to use dashboard interface that will have that content blocked as well in just a few clicks.

The latest version of smoothwall features tools for monitoring and blocking applications as well as monitoring and filtering social media. More and more teachers are using Pinterest and Twitter in class, smoothwall has a solution for that as well.

You can find out more about smoothwall here. You can see smoothwall at ISTE in Atlanta June 28th- July 1st at booth 2528