NetSupport is delighted to announce the latest updates to three key areas of its education solutions – school IT Management, school Safeguarding and Classroom Instruction – as well as the introduction of an all-new Observations and Assessment tracking solution for primary years.
Building on the already comprehensive features in NetSupport DNA’s IT management suite, this latest release contains a host of enhancements and added support to make it indispensable to IT managers as they monitor and manage all the technology across a school or Trust.
Extended features in version 4.7 include enhanced software distribution, endpoint security with encrypted drives, user tracking, custom searches, enhanced device inventory, centralised remote management and much more. Alongside the existing Windows, Mac, iOS and Chrome support, NetSupport DNA now includes the ability to monitor and gather inventories from Android devices and display panels. In addition, there is greater platform support for deployment within MDM devices, plus extra security options.
Within the school eSafety and Safeguarding solutions space, NetSupport is the first vendor to take the concept of keyword filtering and monitoring to the next level by using key components of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to utilise ‘CI’ – Contextual Intelligence – in a new module that delivers a Risk Index for keywords triggered by students.
NetSupport Group MD, Al Kingsley, explains: “We know that professionals’ ‘eyes and ears’ are the best tools for keeping children safe in the classroom. The Risk Index, using CI, provides as close to a digital equivalent as we can for online activity: it automatically assesses the context and history of a child’s activities; whether they are vulnerable; what device they’re on; the time of day; library or supervised classroom; which websites they’re visiting; what previous alerts they may have triggered; what earlier activities may have set the scene – and in doing so, creates a numerical risk indicator when a keyword is triggered.
“Critically, we ensure that all monitoring is kept in-school and that alerts are shared with the local Designated Safeguarding Leads to capitalise
on their knowledge of their own students and thereby removing any requirement to use any external monitoring.
“To complement this leap forward, we have also introduced an all-new cloud-based safeguarding console to allow Designated Safeguarding Leads to access key information and alerts from triggers across the school’s local network while on the go. This fully secure, Azure-hosted console also includes a smartphone-optimised user interface to help them quickly search for a specific child and review any recent alerts or concerns.”
Within the classroom, NetSupport School extends its capabilities with a range of platform enhancements. These include a new unified Classroom and eSafety app for iOS, a new ‘universal’ Student app available from the Windows 10 Store, as well as extended support for Chromebooks. To further streamline the start of lessons in a BYOD environment or when laptop carts are used, integration with leading Student Information Systems is now included to automatically provide the expected list of students for the start of each lesson.
To help those schools who use a mix of classroom devices, we are also delighted to introduce NetSupport School for Mac. This offers complete flexibility for the Mac-led classroom, allowing teachers to connect to their students’ Macs, PCs or Chromebooks directly from their Apple device and ensures thatschools only need a single solution to manage all their devices.
Given that NetSupport is deeply embedded in the education space (with several of our business leaders having roles within education alongside their NetSupport responsibilities), we recognised that there were weaknesses in the current solutions available for monitoring child development and progress – particularly in EYFS and KS1.
Therefore, at Bett 2019, we release our latest product, ReallySchool: an intuitive and easy-to-use tool for tracking and monitoring children’s progress through their foundation stages and into KS1. Already selected as a finalist for the Bett 2019 awards, it creates learning journals of all activities including pictures, video and teacher audio notes; provides tools to develop further parental engagement (a current challenge for many schools); offers the ability to track and identify students who have gaps in their progress; and allows quick identification of those children who are secure in their learning and those who require intervention.
ReallySchool completes NetSupport’s portfolio of education products and ensures that through each stage of school life, NetSupport technology is on hand for support.
“Technology isn’t a panacea for all of the challenges within schools and Trusts, but it can be a powerful enabler when used for the right reasons to address the right challenges,” says Al Kingsley. “We fully understand the pressured environments that our education colleagues work in and our objective is to collaborate closely with teachers, IT managers, safeguarding staff, education sector professionals and specialist organisations – to take their lead and work to deliver genuinely useful tools for schools, while making sure they are as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
“This year, we celebrate our 30thanniversary – something we are hugely proud of and also, we hope, is testimony to the continued evolution of our solutions as a result of working within education and delivering the tools schools actually need. To mark the occasion, at Bett, we are excited to be hosting over 25 leading education speakers on our stand throughout the week, as well as broadcasting NetSupport Radio live each day from the show floor. Finally, we also launch our new Online Safety Almanac and free copies will be available for teachers from our stand all week.”
To learn about NetSupport DNA 4.70 or to download a free trial, visit www.netsupportdna.com/education
To find out more about NetSupport School or to download a free trial, go to www.netsupportschool.com
For more information about ReallySchool, please visit www.reallyschool.com
