School web filter software information

If you represent a company you may find the company web filter benefits page more appropriate.

Protect Students With Emerald Web Shield

As the number of computers in schools increases so does the frequency with which students are exposed to the Internet and everything it has to offer.  With the immense amount of data and content available on the web, often at no cost, computers have become extremely useful as a learning and research tool.  However as computer usage as a teaching tool increases, so does the risk of exposure to inappropriate content.

It is extremely easy to visit an objectionable website unintentionally, particularly a pornographic one.  This is true for children and adults alike.  Publishers of harmful web content often choose domain names for their site that are common misspellings of acceptable sites.

One example is the website that represents the White House and the President of the United States, whitehouse.gov.  The .gov suffix is common for websites administered by the government.  However the .com suffix is more widely familiar among Internet users and even a well-meaning adult can easily make the mistake of attempting to visit whitehouse.com instead.  At one time whitehouse.com led to a pornographic website. 

Now imagine if a teacher attempted to visit a similar website with a group of students and made this mistake.  Even though their intentions would be innocent, their students could be inadvertently exposed to a harmful site.  If the teacher was using a machine protected by a school web filter then such a mistake would result in a harmless block page.

Another example of such a site is holybible.org.  A website publisher at one time posted a pornographic website using the name hollybible.org, a common misspelling of the first site's name.  We see access like this from schools that we currently protect using our web filter software.

However when investigating each case it became clear that the student was attempting to visit the more appropriate site (holybible.com) but accidentally pressed just one extra key on the keyboard to reach hollybible.com.  This is a real-world example of just how easy it is to stumble across a potentially objectionable and/or malicious website, not just for students but for anyone.  A school web filter can prevent innocent mistakes like those described above from causing students to be exposed to harmful material.