Keeping Your Student’s Technology Use Safe
The Bellevue School District does a number of things to protect your student when they are using technology.
Student Internet Filtering
The purpose of an internet filter is to prevent access to:
- Visual depictions that are obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors
- Sites that promote violence and hate, gambling, illegal drugs, and weapons
- Sites that contain malware, spyware or associated with phishing and fraud
What tool does Bellevue use?
We use industry-leading monitoring and response products to filter all district devices for both staff and students.
- A list of categories of web content that is blocked and allowed can be found on our Web Filtering for Students overview.
- There are three levels of access: default, restricted and super restricted.
- All students start in the default level. If students have been identified as abusing district technology, school administrators can request students be placed in a more restricted level.
Access to YouTube
A common question is whether students have access to YouTube. The answer is yes. Although student access is restricted. The district uses YouTube’s Restricted Mode. This helps screen out potentially objectionable content.
How does YouTube do this? They use community flagging, age restrictions in their systems and other signals to identify and filter out potentially inappropriate content. To learn more about YouTube’s Restricted mode, visit their restricted mode information page.
Anti-Virus and Ransomware Protection
To protect students from viruses and ransomware, the district uses advanced threat-detection and response products.
- This protects student computers both at school and home.
- The purpose of the software is to block web and application exploits, dangerous URLs, potentially unwanted apps and malicious code from ever touching student computers.
Student Email Protection
The district provides all students with an email address. For their safety:
- Students grade 8 and below are blocked from receiving and sending emails outside the district. There are a few exceptions to this block that allow interactions with applications that provide educational resources to the district.
- Students grade 9 and above can send and receive emails outside of the district.
To protect students from email that is classified as spam or contains viruses, the district uses multiple layers of protection. On average, 75 percent of all emails that are received from external sources are spam or contain viruses. These are quarantined before making it to student email inboxes.