Mapping and Understanding Student Behavior Through Data

Where many people see problems, Brian Thomas sees progress. In this episode, the President and CEO of Lightspeed Systems talks about the efforts of the edTech industry to address the new realities of remote education and how schools will not only survive this crisis but thrive in its wake.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas (with offices in Portland and the U.K.), Lightspeed uses advanced AI to monitor and analyze activity across the web for signs of self-harm, suicide, cyberbullying, and other inappropriate behaviors. When a potential threat is spotted, real-time alerts are sent to designated personnel, providing screenshots and other important information to drive appropriate intervention. Lightspeed is dedicated to helping schools worldwide provide a safe, mobile and manageable learning environment. The company serves over 15 million students in 35 countries and 28,000 schools globally, including 6,500 school districts in the United States.

The company last month released a new Parent Portal to help parents monitor their child’s online activity on school-issued devices. Research shows that effective home-school communication can improve educational outcomes. The Lightspeed Parent Portal, available now and included free with the Lightspeed Systems web filter, makes it easy for busy parents to keep track of their child’s internet activity.

Overwhelmed parents who are juggling their own work responsibilities while also overseeing their child’s remote learning can gain access to the portal anytime, ensuring their kids are staying on task with their studies. If enabled by the school, the software can also send students’ weekly online activity summaries that recap when the web is being used, top sites visited, top searches, and more. This ensures parents will always have a record of their child’s home internet activity and helps make certain they are safe and focused on learning. “Parents have been placed in an unprecedented situation where they are catapulted into balancing their own jobs with duties as home teachers,” said Brian Thomas, President & CEO, Lightspeed Systems. “Lightspeed’s Parent Portal meets the needs of already overwhelmed parents to have information on their child’s cyber activity and insight into how they’re spending time online. Parents can even pause internet access on the device to maintain healthy screen time.”

The Lightspeed Filter, which pairs more than 20 years of experience mapping and understanding the behavior of students online with a comprehensive solution for web filtering, protects and reports on student activity through a cloud-based platform that supports every device, any OS, on and off campus.

Data available through the platform includes student engagement and activity by day of week, including how much of that activity is educational in nature; real-time Safety Check alerts on students exhibiting concerning behavior such as bullying, self-harm, and suicide; and even Parent Reports.

The Lightspeed platform provides the greatest protection and Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) compliance with its granular controls, powerful YouTube filtering for safe use of video in education, comprehensive AI database, and patented Smart Agent technology that provides hassle-free SSL decryption.

FilterLightspeed Systems provides an end-to-end solution giving schools a remote internet filter for safety monitoring on any device, anywhere.

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