Bexhill Deploys Technology To Monitor Student Web Use

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 09/25/09

Bexhill College, a British sixth form educational institution (akin to an American community college though with slightly younger students), has implemented Spector 360 from SpectorSoft Monitoring Software to meet "duty of care" requirements for student Web access. Among other compliance obligations, these requirements essentially hold that an educator could be held negligent if shown to have failed to act toward others without watchfulness, attention, caution, and prudence.

"We had content filtering, but that was not up to dealing with the proxies," said Bob Bailey, systems engineer and network administrator at Bexhill, a school with about 500 computers."With Spector 360, the first thing I do each day is conduct a search to see if students are going to proxy servers. Spector 360 is so powerful and thorough, it will list and deliver me the users. Despite the best efforts of students to do otherwise, Spector 360 has definitely helped us know what is going on ... and the ability to know what's going on is critical to us meeting our Duty of Care."

Spector 360 records a particular user's Web sites visited, e-mails sent and received, chats and instant messages, keystrokes typed, files transferred, documents printed, and applications run. In addition, through a recording tool, the software shows in exact visual detail what a PC user does. The program takes the recorded activities, feeds that information into a database, and provides configurable reports on Web and application activities.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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