How Henry County Schools Created a More Secure Environment for Students and Staff
About
Students and Staff
Subscription Type
Lite Plus
Includes
2017 GAT deployment
Use Cases
Retract Publicly Shared Files
In the test environment, his team realised that for the sake of convenience, users defaulted to sharing files with public links so the first rule he created in GAT was to change all files ‘with link shared publicly’ to being just ‘shared to anyone with the link’, thus removing them from the public search engine.
“Removing all publicly shared files with GAT from the outset was a huge win for us from a large-scale perspective”
Monitor Student Browsing
Prior to installing GAT Shield, Jeffrey and his team could see that students were doing Google searches but it wasn’t until they deployed GAT Shield, did they know the actual keywords that students were using.
“GAT Shield allowed us to have a view that we didn’t have before. We did not see the content that students were sharing before”
Partnering With GAT Labs
Partnering with GAT Labs has always been important to Jeffrey and his team. Henry County Schools was one of the very first Google domains to deploy 1:1 Chromebooks to students and it was then the partnership with GAT Labs was magnified.
“1:1 wasn’t a thing then but GAT Shield gave us confidence. We can all have good intentions, but unless we have good partnerships to realise those successes, then they are just dreams”
Site Access Control
Sending devices home with students meant that The HCS team had the monumental task of ensuring the devices were secure.
“Site access control was a huge thing for us, and even though we ended up having another content filtering solution on top of it, GAT Shield allowed us to catch a lot of content that the other content filter did not pick up on”
A More Secure Environment
GAT Shield allowed The HCS team to control what students do and do not have access to and GAT+ enabled him to revert publicly shared documents back to ‘public with link only’ and this created a much more secure environment as a whole both for students and staff.
Chromebook ROI
As a 1:1 district, all devices are supplied by the district. A challenge the IT department faced was not knowing about devices with issues, as they weren’t being reported by students. The only way of knowing was when a student physically brings the device into the testing centre. To address this, the HCS team created a rule in GAT that sent an alert to the technicians at the building level if a device hadn’t been used in 2 weeks and a weekly report of all unused devices so the technician could contact the student. His team now gets a monthly report of devices that have been out of commission for 2 weeks across the whole district.
“The end result has a huge impact. We can identify our average breakage rate a lot faster than we normally would, and we get a clear picture of device usage per student and whether providing a device for them is effective or not. It has a direct impact on our ROI of Chromebooks and provides us with exact data that was normally more involved for us to acquire”
This allows them to measure the device breakage rate a lot earlier than normal.
“For us, this was a big achievement and because of our size, we just divided and conquered creating one filter per school in GAT and that was it. It gave us peace of mind”
YouTube Filtering.
For Jeffrey, the YouTube filtering feature in GAT+ is a huge plus. It allows them to monitor not just what videos students are watching but also what videos they are uploading to YouTube.
Staff Changing Roles
When a member of staff changes role, they inevitably will need to access different internal information and no longer require access to files and information pertaining to their previous role. GAT allows this to happen instinctively based on simple rules.
“It happens automatically as you move a person out of one group into another and for us, this is our passive security. We don’t need to worry about removing access to data. It’s all automated”
Auditing
The usefulness of GAT comes into its own for the IT team if any detailed information is required for an audit as they can pull up information by file ID or by IP and by many other criteria.
Relationship with GAT Labs
Jeffrey is happy with the team at GAT Labs and feels there’s a good working relationship.
“There’s a lot to be said about the responsiveness of a partner. With GAT, I can tell them about our challenges and they listen, and they hear, and offer solutions. There’s an intangible value to that and you can’t put a value on it. It’s a priceless value”
Feature Requests
Jeffrey likes that the GAT Team is quick to address questions and suggestions and pays tribute to them for adopting his suggestions, many of which have become key features of GAT Labs products today.
“It’s really good to see some of those suggestions become a reality. It affirms our commitment to GAT because we know when we have a conversation with your engineering team, it’s not just a conversation, they are actionable items”
Results
Henry County Schools, Georgia’s 4th largest School District has worked closely with the team at GAT Labs since 2017 to tweak and customise GAT to enhance their security, manage Chromebooks and effectively audit their Google domain.
When asked what advice would he offer schools facing similar challenges, Jeffrey’s response was;
“I’ll be honest, I think GAT is a necessary tool for schools. There are a lot of advantages to it and I would say, just give it a shot, give it a try and see the benefits, and I think they would end up going with GAT. There aren’t any comparable alternatives I am aware of.”
Jeffrey St. Aime – Enterprise Platforms Coordinator & Google Administrator
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