Lightspeed Parent Portal Introduces Additional Web Browsing Controls

Lightspeed, the provider of the internet monitoring tool used by Shoreline School District, has recently introduced more features in their Parent Portal, which offers parents and guardians much more control over how their children operate online on district-issued Chromebooks outside of school hours. Initial users of the new features have found them intuitive to use and effective at limiting sites their children visit and at what time they are able to access the internet.

Log in to create/access your Lightspeed account using the email account that's associated with you in Skyward likely the address where you have received this post notification): Lightspeed Parent Portal

What are the new and/or enhanced features?

Web Rules

Use this section of controls to manage what sites your child can visit on their Chromebook outside of the school day.

What to know about web rules:

• The district continues to filter student Chromebooks when off campus. The intent of the filter is to block student access to unsafe and/or inappropriate sites for young people. Families have the ability to further adjust restrictions on the sites listed below either by blocking allowed sites or by unblocking some restricted sites.

• "Pause web browsing" blocks access to district-supplied online curriculum and resources as well as a student's google account, including google drive and google documents. We recommend using this only if a family does not want their student on the Chromebook away from school at all or only at times when a student should not be studying or doing homework.

• "Reset web rules" returns a student's account to the default settings determined by the school district, which can then be configured by the parent/guardian.

• Early users of the web rules feature have had mixed results with the "Custom Block List" option to block specific website domains.

 

Schedules

Lightspeed Parent Portal allows for specific schedules of online activity and web rules all days of the week. This is an example of the parent view once a schedule has been set:

When creating a new schedule, there are many options to configure for your student's habits and needs:

Web Activity 

Once registered for an account, you can log on to view a more detailed list of your child’s browsing history outside of school for the last seven days, as shown in this view:

Parents and guardians will continue to receive the weekly digest of their student's activity via email each Sunday. If you don’t want to continue receiving the parent report, unsubscribe from the digest in the parent portal by clicking on your name in the site's navigation pane. Monitoring web activity is not new to Lightspeed Parent Portal, but we have included it here with the other features for awareness. 

Additional Information

Student privacy is important to us and our vendors; therefore, we only use the minimum amount of data to maintain accounts and connections to classes and teachers. View Lightspeed’s privacy policy.

Learn more about Lightspeed features and find an email address to request support.

While parents and guardians have very different preferences and rules for technology in households across the district, we are optimistic that these new features will give greater flexibility and the ability for users to customize students' internet access on district devices.