At-Home Web Filtering & Activity Monitoring

Distance learning has brought forth new challenges each day, not only for IUSD staff and students, but for our parents as well.  When children are at school, we filter their network connection against harmful content, and students' use of technology is largely supervised.  Our teachers have the Blocksi classroom management tool to keep students on task and focused on learning.  Now that students are learning from home, parents have been requesting similar tools to help manage their children's online activity while they are at home.

District Web Filtering

With the move to distance learning, our IT team shifted our filtering strategy to protect students from inappropriate content while they are at home.  We have pushed out Blocksi filtering to every IUSD student's Google account to recreate their on-campus filtering experience as best as possible.  Google searches are forced to Safe Search, and web pages that fall into inappropriate categories are blocked.  While no web filter is perfect, this should provide some peace of mind that your students are protected online.

Parent Tools

The needs of every student and the rules in every home are different and we've received a number of requests for differentiated filtering for specific students.  This is not something we can accommodate using our centralized tools, but we are excited to announce the Blocksi Parent Dashboard as a way to meet these needs.    If you are interested, we can set you up to use this tool to help monitor your child's web activity, manage their screentime, and try to keep them on task while they're working from home. 

Blocksi Parent Dashboard Overview

Actions for you:

1. Watch the Blocksi Parent Dashboard Overview video
   A 6-minute video that covers everything you need to know
2. Go to parent.blocksi.net and create an account
   Please register using the same email address as your Parent Portal account, you can click Sign in with Google button if your email is through Gmail.  Enter your child's email address when prompted, his will be their username@iusd.org.  Finding Your Child's Username
3.  Wait for a confirmation email from Blocksi
   Our team needs to review each request and make sure each parent matches up to the requested student in Aeries.  We try to get to this within about 1 business day, but depending on the volume of requests, our response time may vary.

This is an optional resource for parents but will require you to set policies.  Individual policies can't be managed by IUSD IT.  
We'll do our best to provide directions to help you, but we don't have visibility into what you configure and can't create individual policies and restrictions for you on your account to manage your students at home.  If you do need support from us, we may ask you to take a few screenshots of the Parent Dashboard and we can point you in the right direction.