Introduction #
GAT Shield collects all browsing activity on the domain users’ accounts that it is deployed to.
We can configure a filter to check how long, and how many times, all users, or any user, have used Google Chat (or any other site).
You can find how long the users are using Google chat from the Browsing section in GAT Shield.
Please see the screenshot below, and carefully follow the steps in order to set this up:
- In GAT Shield, click the ‘Browsing‘ tab, then the ‘filter‘ icon.
- Click the ‘Add group‘ button, and then the second ‘Add rule‘ button where it has appeared.
- Filter by Site URL, and enter the URL’s for google chat.
- The Site URLs you need to add are ‘mail.google.com/chat‘ & ‘mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#chat‘.
- Set the definition operator for the group of rules to ‘OR‘, because we want to find people using chat from either URL.
- Lastly, change the ‘equals’ on the Site URL parameter, to ‘matches (partial string or regex)’, because the URL’s will not be exact, each chat will have an extra part at the end of the URL.
This ensures we will get all chats.
This will ensure you get a record of the students using it from the Gmail app or the chat app.
Filtering for that will show you a pie chart of the data, with the total time spent by all users on Google Chat.
Check for a specific Classroom #
You’ll need to know the classroom ID. That can be found in GAT+ in the classroom section.
If you want to use this filter in the future, you might want to use the Apply & Save button, so you have it again.
Monitor Google Chat – General Overview Graph #
To see a general graph of when Google Chat is most used, simply access the Dashboard section in GAT Shield.
You can get an overview of the either Internal Chats or the External chats, by just clicking the dropdown arrow on any of the graphs on the dashboard to set the graph.
