Texas District Looks to Device Management To Control Social Media

The Lewisville Independent School District has adopted a new Web security and mobile device control solution to support its one-to-one computing initiative.

As part of its "1:x initiative," as the program has been dubbed, the district has distributed 24,000 iPads — with a goal to distribute 53,000 total — to students and also allows them to use their own devices.

The district's existing Web-filtering solution did not meet its "needs for ensuring Web protection for students and staff on their mobile devices as well desktops," according to a news release. "The Lewisville IT team also identified SSL inspection and granular social media and Web 2.0 application controls as critical requirements that they needed a new Web filtering solution to provide."

The district decided to adopt ContentKeeper because it is device agnostic and allowed the IT team to manage devices centrally.

"We liked the way ContentKeeper handled SSL filtering and Web 2.0 applications," said Patrick Johnson, manager of network and technical services for the district, in a prepared statement. "This was critical for us - it's what the kids do. We identified 6 or 7 social media applications we needed to be able to granually control. ContentKeeper enables us to set granular policies over social networking sites and applications. When we identified one or two media types that didn't appear to be available in the product, ContentKeeper added support for them overnight. It's a level of support and responsiveness that we hadn't seen from a vendor before."

Located in Flower Mound, TX, the Lewisville Independent School District serves more than 50,000 students with 41 elementary schools, 15 middles schools, 5 high schools, and nine additional campuses. More information is available at lisd.net.

Go to contentkeeper.com to learn more about ContentKeeper.

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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