Tech Talk: Robert Williams from Nye County School District

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Tech Talk with Robert Williams

00:04 (Amy Bennett from Lightspeed Systems)

Hi everybody, I am Amy from Lightspeed and I’m out talking to some customers to see how they’re doing. I have Robert Williams from Nye School District in Nevada. How are you, Robert?

00:13 (Robert Williams from Nye County School District)

Good, keeping busy that’s for sure.

0:15

Yeah, you guys have been on remote learning for several weeks now, and I understand this really kicked off your one-to-one with students taking devices home?

0:28

Yeah we were one-to-one in terms of quantity of devices, even you know for about a year now.

00:38

Yeah and it’s going pretty smoothly so far?

00:41

It’s going reasonably well. I mean, we still have issues with the digital divide, in terms of some students just don’t have internet access, and trying to get them that access is challenging.

00:50

I’m glad to hear though that Relay (Lightspeed Filter) and filtering was able to at least solve the problem of students being safe and having protected, appropriate access. Tell me how that’s going?

01:01

Yeah we are at a huge advantage over some of the other districts that I’m aware of because we had already implemented Relay (Lightspeed Filter) and we push out the agent to all of our Chromebooks as an extension. And you know, so within the schools, we’ve been using it for quite a while, and so the kids were kind of used to those messages when they’re trying to go to block sites, or if they get shut down for that, they were surprised to find out that it worked the same way.

01:28

And then we also use Safety Check (Lightspeed Alert), and so we have been able to identify some students also through (Lightspeed Alert) and (Lightspeed Filter) that have been in emotional distress.

01:45

I’m sure we have saved some lives.

01:49

I have heard about the impact of Safety Check (Lightspeed Alert) in saving lives from a lot of people, increasingly during this remote learning period because of the Relay (Lightspeed Filter) filtering, and

the Safety Check (Lightspeed Alert), in the issue you know

that protect us with COPPA and FERPA.

02:04

When kids are doing things in the middle of the night with their Chromebook that they have at home, not thinking that it’s monitored content, we’ve also been able to discover some kids that are trying to do things online that’s really bad for kids. We have a lot of our filtering options, like we see a

02:25

lot of things come through on the reports for games that kids are trying to play, or they are successfully playing, like when we’re looking at pornography or sexting or games that are M rated that they’re trying to use or kids that are trying to get around our filtering through attempting to install VPN.

02:49

So we manage how were able to catch and stop all of it that. We have yet to have a kid, I mean, I kind of have a bounty out there, I’ve told kids, if you can figure out how to get around Relay (Lightspeed Filter) on your Chromebook, let me know and we’ll make sure that you get recognized for it.

03:02

So far nobody’s done it.

03:08

I am certainly hearing a similar thing that the normal filtering rules are relaxed gaming, certain gaming sites like you said, may be a little bit of social media, but protecting the kids from that really dangerous inappropriate content.

03:23

I’m glad we’re helping you out there.

03:25

And then on YouTube, were keeping those videos appropriate and safe for you too.

03:31

Yeah we do all of our filtering for students on YouTube videos directly through Relay (Lightspeed Filter), so some things like when

somebody uploads content to YouTube, it doesn’t necessarily get automatically tagged as educational. So those videos will often automatically get blocked because they’re uncategorized content.

03:50

So teachers, we set up a tool so that teachers can check to see if their content is blocked that they want to use with students, and they let us know if “hey can you unblock these videos for the kids?”

04:03

We see how hard everybody’s working and that’s part of why we wanted to talk to you, just to make sure we’re sharing out the stories of our hard-working school districts, from the IT staff to the teachers, and everywhere in between.

04:15

Well thanks for reaching out and I can tell you I really appreciate the support we’ve had from Lightspeed. And then I’ve sent in a few requests and I’ve gone back and forth with our sales rep on some new things that we’re going to try, and the response has been very prompt, and positive, and I appreciate that too.

04:31

Great! Did you see the new online activity dashboard that came out last week?

04:34

I did, yeah, it’s pretty nice to be able to see how kids are spending their time online.

04:38

It’s a good example of our

developers reacting really quickly to what our customers need right away with this shift to remote learning.

04:50

So, keep the feedback and the requests coming!

04:53

Well thanks a lot, appreciate you Robert!

04:56

You’re welcome, see ya, have a nice afternoon!

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