Safety Measures To Monitor Students Online Behavior Management

New Delhi: It is a matter of pride when we say that the number of internet users in India will reach 500 million by June 2018. The report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB says also states that internet penetration in urban India reached 64.84% in last December owing to the boost given by Digital India.

According to a Unicef report in 2017, one in three Internet users in the world is a minor or child. A similar study conducted by Intel Security in 2015 reveals that around 81% of Indian children aged between 8 and 16 years are active on social media networks, and about 22% of them are bullied online.

This has become a matter of concern especially in the wake of recent mishappenings due to the infamous Blue Whale Challenge that saw the loss of many young lives. Children are becoming more and more internet literate but they are very far from being internet conscious, therefore there is a dire need for parents and teachers to educate them well about cyber safety. A school would be the best place to make children aware about this issue.

In present circumstances you can’t stress more on the importance of teaching cyber safety in schools. Many schools have been organizing cyber safety sessions. Schools like Genesis Global School do many things to deliver safe internet, apart from the general safety practices.

Mr. Amit Gupta, Manager – IT at Genesis Global School, Noida points out a few measures.

· The school uses internet content filtering hardware appliance (firewall). This restricts the children from wandering away to unsafe internet sites.

· VPN tunnelling, port bypassing and torrent downloading is restricted in the school preventing the children get access to harmful content.

· Every user of GGS gets internet access after user authentication. This helps keep a tab on who is accessing what kind of content on the internet.

· All student screen activities are monitored in labs and their devices via security software to keep an eye on what they are browsing.

· Every GGS internet user has an internet access time and browsing data limit which lets them spend only quality time on the internet.

· Safe search is enabled on major search engines at DNS level so that student can’t search inappropriate images on any browser.

· The school has also conducted sessions for parents and the students separately to update them about the various types of cyber breaches they can come across and also the measures they should be taking, when online.