In today's connected world, the wealth of information and opportunities that technology offers is immense. However, there's a darker side to this digital environment that leaves individuals vulnerable to all kinds of accidental or intentional harm.
Issues can range from access to inappropriate sites due to misspelling, accidental viewing of pornography and illegal images or more sinister and intentional harm from predator grooming, cyber bullying, gambling, self-harm and suicide sites to name but a few.
Whilst recognising all this, children and young people cannot be held back from all the positive benefits offered by information technology that has become an essential part of their everyday world. The problem is how to monitor, manage, educate and restrict use to protect the individual.
RM Education have partnered with e-safe education to deliver a specialist solution dedicated to the protection and safety of children and young people in the ICT environment. The comprehensive threat detection and reporting system enables a child's risk of exposure to inappropriate materials, bullying and online grooming activity to be significantly reduced whilst also educating young people about responsible use of ICT from the moment they breach policy.
In essence we will put some software on your school network that will run in the background of every computer. This software then sends data securely to e-safe education's monitoring personnel (who are all CRB cleared and CEOP trained). They will then send regular reports to personnel in the school (these people are defined by the school) to allow you to track e-Safety issues.
The issues that are being monitored fall broadly into the following categories:
- Inappropriate text
- Inappropriate images
- Hate / racism
- Grooming
- Cyberbullying
- Gambling
- Self harm and Suicide
Image detection - uses advanced image processing analysis for decision making, meaning the software can identify skin tones, plus texture, edge, limb and mass.
Text detection - scans for obscene and innocent words in any document online and offline, and then the software makes a decision based on these words.
Threat libraries - are combinations of words, phrases and websites related to specific categories. For example, cyber bullying and grooming.
USB control - this allows you to control USB devices, including which file types can be moved onto the PC. For example, you can allow Word documents, but not allow JPEGs, or EXE files.
Multi Lingual - e-safe can be setup to recognise the characters of almost any language providing protection regardless of ethnicity and background.
Virtual Teaching Assistant - the virtual teaching assistant protects users through pop up messages. These messages can be set up, down to the individual user and to include different threat libraries and in any language.
Full Managed Service - because you don't have the time to trawl through reams of information, e-safe will send you daily and weekly reports to highlight incidents, allowing you to take the appropriate action. If you need advice on what the suitable action is, then e-safe will be happy to help.
Trend Analysis - the reporting features mean that over time, you can actually evidence changing behaviour and the way people are using ICT in a safer more responsible way.
Safeguarding - provides early and effective intervention allowing schools to protect children against coming into contact with inappropriate online content from the outset through the use of the advanced threat libraries, as well as through text and image detection.
Freedom & Independent Learning - enables children and young people to exploit the power of the internet and web 2.0 facilities in a positive manner without the need for constant supervision.
Behavioural Change - encourages a responsible approach to ICT in school that applies teaching and learning principles to drive behavioural change which engages rather than disaffects the end user.
Complete Operational System Management - e-safe is a unique service that eliminates the operational burden and legal risk for schools involved in monitoring ICT use, it utilises trained forensic experts and frees up time for teachers to focus on intervention.
Real Time Protection - e-safe provides an additional layer of protection through real time, personalised messages, triggered at the point a suspected transgression occurs to help educate and avoid alienating the end user.
Incident Management - helps you to more effectively manage incidents. From minor infractions, through to serious incident notifications against a pre-agreed escalation aligned to child protection team procedure.
Multi Cultural - e-safe provides a true multi-lingual capability to embrace all cultures and backgrounds that provides schools with a genuine community wide solution.
See e-safe in action in our video examples.