Technology
June 13, 2019

As “School Season” Comes to a Close

GoGuardian Team
An illustration of a school bus headed down the road

In the past few months, your favorite TV shows came to a close for the season. You watched your finales and perhaps saw previews of what’s to come in the fall, and hopefully you were excited for shows to return in a few months (except for one, maybe. Winter is sadly not coming again...but fall is!). In the television industry, it’s called a “hiatus.” In education, most call it “summer break.” But it all means the same thing: we break for summer and come back strong for the next season. The truth is, while the viewers are taking summer breaks from watching the show, the production keeps running in order to bring you top content for the fall. And that’s what we’re doing too.

GoGuardian never takes a break. In fact, we’ll spend the summer ramping up to bring you new products, features, and enhancements when the school year starts again. Like any good show does for its loyal viewers, we want to give you a recap of what you’ve seen thus far and a preview of what’s to come. Here’s the Spring Finale (past updates to products) and Fall Preview (future updates to products) of the show we call “School Year”:

GoGuardian Admin

The brainiacs on the GoGuardian Admin team have been working hard to integrate the newest filtering and user experience advancements into our Admin product. These updates mean more value for you!

Past/Spring Updates

  • Dashboard Visualization: The pie chart is back, and we’ve made improvements for larger screen resolutions.
  • “Right Now” card: A new feature in your dashboard with GoGuardian Teacher Classroom integration! This card gives an up-to-date count of students online and active GGT classrooms.
  • Smart Filtering for Proxies: More improvements! Instead of using outdated URL lists, our technology scans for common proxy network patterns and consistently blocks proxy sites that have never been seen before.
  • Dynamic Filtering Categories: Dynamic filtering categories powered by machine learning. We automatically add URLs to categories including Explicit, Gaming, and Entertainment. So far, more than 600,000 URLs have been added and more are added daily, continuously scaling your filter to keep up with the internet’s expansion.

Future/Fall Updates

  • Image Recognition: The new image classification system identifies explicit images and blocks at the millisecond level. It will be seamlessly integrated into Smart Alerts, making our system more powerful with a flip of a switch.
  • Gaming: Admin’s upcoming gaming filter will employ continuous user engagement metrics to block gaming websites during school hours.
  • Threat Detection: Our threat detection tool will utilize existing infrastructure to alert customers to high-risk browsing behavior. This new feature will live within Smart Alerts as a new "Threats" section and will work by scanning for high-risk keywords in student browsing activity.
  • Global Navigation Panel: Design and layout improvements of our global navigation panel will highlight the active page for a better customer experience.
  • Reporting: Aggregate and student reporting will be made more powerful by increasing your date selection range.

Take a look at Admin!

Various digital devices floating in the sky

GoGuardian DNS

Past, Present, and Future

GoGuardian DNS is a new unified and scalable cloud filtering solution built to help keep all of your users safe. It has been designed to filter all student and staff devices, regardless of platform, including BYOD and guest devices on your network.

Get to know DNS!

An illustration of students sitting in a classroom on their laptops

GoGuardian TEACHER

The latest updates to the Teacher product make Scenes easier with Scene Statuses and Quick List Sharing.

Past/Spring Updates

  • Scene Statuses: The Scenes feature is easier to use than ever before! With Scene Statuses, teachers can see the scenes currently applied, force apply a scene, and clear all scenes for every student in their active class session.
  • Quick List Sharing: Admins can now manage and share URL lists for their teachers to use in creating scenes.

Future/Fall Updates

Big changes coming to GoGuardian Teacher! We will be updating the interface and releasing updates this summer. Please be aware of this when scheduling trainings. We will provide more information when the updates are ready, as well as updated training videos and demo videos that reflect these changes.

  • Smart Monitoring: This new Teacher feature will automatically detect when students are off-task and alert teachers to this behavior. We hope that by automating the process of monitoring student screens, we can save teachers valuable time and energy. With Engagement scores, reports of the class will show student engagement metrics.
  • Interface Updates: Updates to the interface will:
  • Enable teachers to drag and drop student tiles and classroom tiles, group students, send commands like chat or open tabs directly from a student tile.
  • Enhance the timeline view and usability, improve navigation.
  • Provide more information on each classroom card.
  • Simplify the set-up process for classroom creation, adding students, and adding teachers.
  • Scene Enhancements: More Scenes enhancements will enable teachers to delete scenes and add URLs to a scene while it is running, as well as other updates that improve Scenes creation and usability.

Learn about Teacher!

An illustration of a lighthouse next to the words "Sometimes kids need help asking for help."

GoGuardian Beacon

Past, Present, and Future

Beacon is our newly released tool for suicide and self-harm prevention in schools. The tool looks at students’ online activity and behavior for warning signs, and it delivers alerts so that you can proactively identify and assist students who are silently suffering. Since its launch in February, Beacon users have already reported the prevention of several self-harm and suicide attempts.

Meet Beacon!

User Management screen next to Bulk Add/Update Users

Org Management

Future/Fall Updates

  • Access to install Chrome extensions settings: The settings to install chrome extensions will soon be available in the org management interface and not just Admin interface, simplifying the process for those organizations that use other GoGuardian products but do not have GoGuardian Admin.
  • Access to Chromebook Only settings: Similarly, the Chromebook Only setting will also be moved from Admin to Org Management, so that users of all products will now have easy access to this setting.
GoGuardian logo next to ClassLink and Clever logos

Integrations

Past/Spring Updates

GoGuardian now integrates with ClassLink and Clever! Easily set up GoGuardian Teacher classrooms by syncing your students, teachers, and classrooms from ClassLink or Clever. Any changes made to your ClassLink or Clever rosters will be automatically reflected in GoGuardian Teacher. By automating classroom setup and roster maintenance, these integrations relieve teachers of administrative tasks and help ensure that students are in the correct classes, all year round! During our beta testing period, a school district synced 630 Classrooms with 1,300 Students in 15 seconds.

Future/Fall Updates

  • Enhancements to ClassLink & Clever Integrations:
  • Enhancements to the ClassLink and Clever integrations will support single sign-on. Now users will be able to access GoGuardian products from their Clever or ClassLink dashboard.
  • Google Admin Console Organizational Units (GAC) (OUs) will be supplemented with ClassLink and Clever OUs, so schools that do not use GAC or do not have highly structured OUs in GAC can instead use their OUs from ClassLink and Clever with GoGuardian products.
  • Further enhancements to the ClassLink and Clever integrations will provide more details for sync reporting, giving admins more context if errors occur during syncs of ClassLink or Clever data with GoGuardian.
  • New Integration Efforts:
  • GoGuardian is working on importing parent and guardian data, which will be valuable in setting up GoGuardian Beacon or the upcoming Parent App.
  • We’ll soon be integrating with different SISs and LMSs, like Schoology and Canvas. These integrations will enable us to provide an optimized user experience.
  • In order to enable our solutions to continuously deliver on our digital learning promise, GoGuardian has an innovative Research team focused on understanding the impact of our products. Because of this team's research, we're able to provide you, our customers, with the insights necessary to make a confident purchasing decision. As a part of the research process, we are committed to ensuring our products reflect the needs and voices of our customers. If you are a customer or user of GoGuardian products and are interested in getting more involved with our research on digital learning experiences, please contact Research@GoGuardian.com.

Other Updates

The GoGuardian MVP Club logo

MVP Club Chromebook Giveaway

We’re running two separate giveaways for Chromebooks for MVP Club members! Head on over to MVP Club, and you’ll see the two contests immediately.

  • The first contest is for referrals: each qualified referral that you submit will earn you an entry into the giveaway.
  • The second contest is for demo and trialing a new product that you don’t already have: for each new product that you try, you will earn an entry into the giveaway.

Easy enough, right? Good luck entering, referring, and trialing!

EOY Best Practices for GoGuardian Admin and Teacher

For best-practice checklists on preparing GoGuardian Admin and GoGuardian Teacher accounts for summer, head over to the Help Center. You can also copy these links to share with your users!

ISTE

For those of you attending the ISTE conference this year, GoGuardian will be at Booth 1752 to share more about our products, including a chance to preview the Parent App!

Join us at ISTE!

The words Coming Soon next to Wally the raccoon

Parent App

Sharing reports of students’ online activities with parents will soon be easy and efficient. Our new Parent App will enable parents to receive read-only, on-demand, and up-to-date student reports so that they can have open and honest conversations about internet safety. The app will eliminate the need for parents to send requests to schools, thereby lessening the burden on your admin team. Parents will be able to download the app onto their own devices and check on their children’s online activity.

Windows

The days of “Chrome device only” will soon be no more! The next iteration of our support for Windows is here, enabling you to expand your Google Education environment onto Windows.

Fall 2019 is going to be the best season yet for GoGuardian customers!

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