Filtering Student Hot Spots

bill_ries
New Contributor

Has anyone found a good solution to students who enable their phone's mobile wifi hot spot and switch their iPad over to it thereby bypassing the school's web filter while at school?

5 REPLIES 5

CasperSally
Valued Contributor II

You need to look into mobile/home filters. Not sure what you use on premise, if they have off site option.

We use iBoss, but we don't filter iPads off premise.

Don't bother looking at iPrism. Lightspeed might be worth a look.

bill_ries
New Contributor

Does that mean you don't have students doing this at your school? We weren't planning to filter offsite either. Onsite we use WatchGuard's WebBlocker. I'm not sure they support filtering offsite filtering, but I've contacted them in order to verify. If they don't, I'm considering contacting OpenDNS or Securly, but am open to suggestions.

RMc
New Contributor

I have recently learned about Anywhere Filter but cannot find any reviews of the product.

davidacland
Honored Contributor II
Honored Contributor II

It would be difficult to stop this on iOS as the users are admins by default. It's certainly a behavioural problem and would be worth tackling head on. I've tried using technical ways to solve these types of the problems in the past and the kids just see it as a challenge.

The only other thought is restricting allowed websites via a profile (requires the iPads to be supervised I think), that way it wouldn't matter which Internet connection they used.

RMc
New Contributor

Securly is a cloud-based system that is integrated with Google. The fact that it doesn't involve an additional appliance is attractive. Again, I haven't heard much about it, though. It's only a couple of years old.