Below you can find a series of webinar recordings that were attended by trial participants of Smoothwall Monitor Managed Service. Each webinar has a set of questions which were provided by our trial partcipants and answered live by our Monitor experts.
Our exclusive webinar with Northern Education Trust is an opportunity for you to hear from a Smoothwall Monitor customer as they share their experience of digital monitoring and give frank advice for anyone considering this form of safeguarding.
By clicking on each of the questions below, you will be taken to the specific point within our webinars in which that specific question was asked and answered.
Smoothwall Monitor Participant Trial Webinar 1 - September 2020
- How can you tell if Monitor Managed Service is working?
- What private information can Monitor capture? Can it capture bank details for example?
- Can we arrange some extra training, who should we contact?
- We haven’t received our client distribution instruction?
- We have had no captures shown on our dashboard. Is it working, or should we just wait?
- I’ve read on your website about schools using monitor to pick up on general anxieties amongst students such as Brexit or now COVID-19, and then having special assemblies or 1:1 sessions to better inform pupils and allay fears. How does it do that if the words used around Brexit for example are general fears but contain no trigger words?
- If we decide to adopt Monitor permanently, do we need a new installation, or do we continue with this same installation? Is the trial a full version of Monitor or a bridged version?
- Can we get an idea of pricing in case we decide to have Monitor permanently after the trial? Are there discounts available for multiple schools in a MAT?
- Is anyone monitoring staff devices too?
- We have had no captures shown on our dashboard. Is it working, or should we just wait?
- Can you explain a bit more about student privacy, specifically how much information do your moderators see on each student, and what measures are in place to stop that information being shared with third parties?
- Can you control the camera on a laptop?
- What kind of events are schools recording in general? Would Smoothwall provide that information for comparison?
- Do you have schools that have decided against Monitoring, and if so why?
Digital Monitoring Customer Q&A with Northern Education Trust - September 2020
- Northern Education Trust won the BETT Impact Award 2020 in January this year. What sort of impact has Monitoring had that impressed the judges so much to honour you with the award?
- In the first six months of using Smoothwall Monitor Northern Education Trust received up to 400 genuine incidents where a student was at potential risk of harm. If you’d not had a monitoring provision in place, what would have happened to those students at risk do you think? Would they have gone unnoticed?
- Some Schools and Trusts talk to us about tick in the box compliance vs being child centred when it comes to their digital safeguarding. There is a real difference isn’t there?
- Can you expand on how Smoothwall Monitor has enabled you to pick up on trends and lower level fears amongst students across the Trust, which have enabled you to put provisions in place to help educate students on these subjects?
- Do you manage your monitoring centrally or is responsibility devolved to each school, and why?
- Have your DSLs given you any feedback as to how they are using Monitoring, what they think of it and how easy it is to use?
- Did you encounter any barriers from stakeholders such as individual school Headteachers in the early stages? If so, what were they and how did you address them?
- Does Northern Education Trust monitor staff devices, and would you recommend this to others?
- Governors are playing an increasing role in safeguarding. How did you communicate monitoring to your Governors and to what extent are they involved with your safeguarding at the moment?
- We do hear from some schools that the eyes and ears of Teachers are enough to spot any risks. Have you had any feedback from your Teachers on whether they feel a relief in pressure knowing that they have an extra safety net in place?
- Rob, for those who may not be familiar with how digital monitoring actually works, can you provide a quick run through of what happens when a child types something into a Word document or online where there is potential risk involved?
- How do the schools in your trust work with level 1 and level 2 events?
- What has been the impact on your IT department? Have workloads, increased, decreased, or stayed the same?
- As a trust with 21 schools across Primary and Secondary, when you were deploying Smoothwall Monitor, roughly how much time was required from your IT team?
- Have you found with COVID-19 and the lockdown that you have students taking devices home? How has monitoring worked with that?
- How much of a role has Monitor played during your return to school and the reintegration phase?
- Can you expand on how you are using ICT curriculum led budgeting to get more digital safeguarding for the same budget you had before? Is there anything other MATs could perhaps follow to help free up budget for adopting monitoring, or extending their current digital safety or IT provisions?
- Do you offer BYOD parental purchase schemes, and if so do you monitor these under own devices? Do you monitor offsite as well?
- We are a primary MAT investigating digital monitoring but have concerns that this solution would not provide the impact or benefit to our younger years. What would you say to this?
- What is the most important piece of advice that you can give to anyone considering digital monitoring as part of their digital safeguarding strategy?
Smoothwall Monitor Participant Trial Webinar 2 - October 2020
- How can we tell if Monitor Managed Service is actually working?
- What is the technical functionality for switching monitoring activity on/off based on user profile?
- What should we do with level 1 and 2 alerts?
- Can you clarify what you do and don’t monitor when it comes to staff? Are other schools monitoring staff devices too?
- If we receive no notifications for alerts level 3-5 do you recommend checking the portal every day or every other day for lower level alerts?
- We don’t want staff being called out of hours and in personal time. What is the status in other schools? Is there a way to manage this?
- I watched the Q&A webinar you did with Mark Osborne at Northern Education Trust and was interested to hear how they use Monitor across the trust to pick up trends and fears amongst students around news topics and use it to address issues with them. But how does it pick that up if the words they use aren’t necessarily trigger words?
- How do I integrate Monitor with our record keeping system? What does it entail?
- How much information do the moderators see on each student, and what measures are in place to prevent information being shared with third parties?
- What are other schools doing about mobile phone usage? If the students know we are using Monitor, surely, they will just use their phones to do things they shouldn’t be doing instead? Doesn’t that defeat the object?
- How do we know nothing will be missed by moderators?
- We haven’t had any events recorded. Is it working or do we just need to wait?
- Are there any plans for Monitor to work on iOS or android in the future?
- If we need some extra training, who do we contact for this?
- Who is the best person to talk to about deploying Monitor permanently?