Securly: Manage Screen Time - Any Device, Anywhere

Securly is a relatively new service designed to help school districts monitor and filter web behavior from any device on their network.  They have a ton of awesome features that allow you to customize the service to the specific needs to your school or district, and they even allow for a focus on student achievement, not just blocked content.  The Securly team has a lot to offer, so let's check them out!

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Before we begin, if you're interested in exploring all that Securly has to offer, you can check out their Youtube channel.  For this post, we'll go ahead and start with a short video from their team.  The focus in this video is on Chromebooks, but they now offer their service for any internet-enabled device:

Before we dig into the review, the Securly team is currently updating their pricing model, but they do have a freemium version which can give you a good idea if the service is right for you.

With that out of the way, let's explore what the service has to offer!  When you first sign into the dashboard, you can immediately see a summary of the most visited pages, the students who are raising the most flags, the sites that represent the "top offenses," and all sorts of similar data.

However, with the flip of a switch (literally), you can view the positive behavior of students, and see the beneficial sites that students are using as well.  For me, this was one of the most important features of Securly.  By showing not only what "bad" sites are being visited, but also the positive internet resources that students are using, teachers and administrators can get a better idea of what online resources are actually beneficial.

The Securly Dashboard

As you would expect with any sort of monitoring/filtering service, you can set up your policies however you would like to, depending on subject areas, grade levels, administrator preferences, and so on. You have complete freedom as to how you want to filter internet traffic, and you can do so by site names, categories, or even keywords.

Another feature I really love is the "sentiment analysis" which analyzes all social media posts for negative words/phrases/ideas.  Based on the demonstration I saw, it's running a pretty powerful algorithm that does an excellent job detecting negative or inappropriate posts.

The Audit Trail Shows All Past Traffic

Securly also has a new option for parents which will give them insight into how their kids are using devices like Chromebooks and iPads both at school and at home.  You can find out more information about that here on their blog.

Finally, the last feature I really like about Securly is the ability for administrators to receive email notifications if certain flags are triggered. This way, if a student is visiting particular sites, or using certain search terms, an administrator can be notified right away to help resolve the issue.

In short, Securly is an excellent service that works with any kind of internet-enabled device, is cloud-based which makes for easier scalability, and has an incredibly friendly user interface that is easy to pick up with very minimal training.  If you're interested in learning more about Securly, you can check out this blog post on "The Power of Positive Web Filtering" which offers a nice perspective on the service.  

With all that being said...

The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I was not compensated for writing this review.