Piloting a Solution to Avoid Unexpected Student Blocking

As Barrington 220 teachers may know, Staff and Student groups have different access on our district web filtering system. Our web filters are further customized by grade level for Students. This situation sometimes results in a teacher assigning a resource to students and finding out that the resource is blocked for students. Until now, teachers have had no easy way to test student resources in advance.

The Technology & Innovation Department recently began a test to hopefully solve this problem. All certified staff have both a MacBook Air laptop and iPad assigned to them, and we are now able to set devices to different filtering settings—even if device is assigned to a specific group. We are keeping the MacBook Air laptop filtered with Staff settings, but changing the Staff iPad to use our Student filter settings.

Teachers can now test resources they are assigning to students on the Staff iPad.

Please note three considerations for these new iPad settings for Staff:

• Filtering is active 24/7, both on and off district networks.
• This new setting applies only to certified and administrative staff iPads; classified staff will not be affected.
• Following student iPad filtering, remember that social media and video streaming platforms will no longer be accessible on a Staff iPad.

Please contact your building Library Technology Associate (LTA), call x. 1500, and/or otherwise contact the Department of Technology & Innovation with questions, comments, or concerns about this setting change. 

Although we are testing this in advance, you may have additional information we did not experience during testing.