FILTERING THE VOID: HOW TO MANAGE THE EVER-EXPANDING INTERNET IN EDUCATION

In the time it takes to read this workshop description, 12,000 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube, 2,400 new websites will be registered to the internet, and over 7.3 million photos will be uploaded to Facebook. The internet is changing at an unprecedented rate. What was yesterday a thought-piece on Alexander Hamilton could today be a spammy web page filled with diet pill ads and hate speech. In this dynamic landscape, how can we give students access to the internet while keeping them safe from inappropriate content?In this workshop, we’ll take a deep dive into the online-management challenges educators currently face, explore the inherent failings of URL filtering, and discover the opportunities that real-time, context-aware Smart Filtering presents. Schools are in dire need of scalable filtering solutions that can keep up with the dynamic, ever-expanding terrain that is the internet. With the power of AI filtering, educators are able to move beyond URL filtering to truly understand the context of student activity online, which is paramount in order to understand and act in real time to ensure student safety. Ultimately, we’ll discover how context-aware Smart Filtering works to understand the whole page -- and in turn, better serves the needs of the whole child.