CrossTec SchoolVue and the CIPA

Do you really know what your students are doing?
In December, 2000 the Neighborhood Children's Internet Protection Act (S. 1545) was signed into law requiring schools and libraries receiving universal service assistance (e-rate) funding to implement community-directed Internet use policies to prevent minors from being subject to inappropriate and harmful material on the Internet. E-rate recipients are now required to include blocking, filtering, or monitoring systems within their Internet use policy to prevent minors from being exposed to pornography, obscenity, or other harmful materials.

Estimates say that cyber-loafing accounts for 30% to 40% of lost student productivity, while also slowing your network and potentially opening your organization up to costly and embarrassing litigation. While filtering applications could be an answer, the inexactness of filters, particularly in terms of blocking access to protected speech, and the inability to block every harmful site is a major concern.

The CIPA Act allows local communities to control what technology they select and how they configure it. One highly useful tool for monitoring student cyber-slacking is CrossTec SchoolVue. Although CrossTec SchoolVue’s monitoring technology is not specifically mentioned in the bill, SchoolVue can certainly help schools and communities respond to this regulation. CrossTec SchoolVue is a set of essential tools for Instructors. With CrossTec SchoolVue modules installed on networked student and library PCs, teachers and administrators can monitor PC activity by seeing what is on each user’s PC screen. Loaded in the “Stealth Mode,” users do not even know that the software is running on their system.

CrossTec SchoolVue enables teachers and librarians to monitor student PCs and control Internet use a couple of different ways. 1. A teacher can use a Thumbnail View which will automatically bring up a thumbnail of multiple student PCs. 2. Teachers can remote control one or more student PCs for a real-time view of multiple student screens 3. With one click of the “Monitor” button student screens can be viewed one at a time in real-time. 4. SchoolVue provides URL blocking - teachers can either block specific sites during the class or block all sites except for specific sites (such as the schools web site or NASA.gov). 5. SchoolVue tracks which web sites (and applications) that students use including the time the started the program or first visited the site, how long they were on the site, and when they ended. So teachers can print out a report of Internet usage. Additionally, SchoolVue also lets teachers see which sites (or programs) a student is using right now. If the teacher sees a prohibited site they can drag it onto a list to restricted sites. With any of these methods if an instructor sees a student is having a problem or is browsing prohibited Internet material they can take control of the PC, launch another application, send a Message to the student or lock their keyboard and mouse and record or print out the offending screen.

CrossTec SchoolVue users report that once it is known that this capability exists, productivity increases while problems decrease dramatically. If you are concerned about cyber-slacking and its impact on your organization, give CrossTec SchoolVue a try. Just using the free evaluation for a couple of weeks could lead to increased productivity and a wealth of knowledge on how your users are spending their time.

Using CrossTec SchoolVue, an Instructor can broadcast their screen, multimedia files, or any student's screen to other participants; record and playback screen sessions; control printer and removable drive use; monitor students as they work; restrict the use of applications and web sites; carry on bidirectional text or audio conversations and lectures; create, administer, monitor and automatically grade tests; remote control a student PC for one-on-one instruction and much more.

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