Education Channel Partner

• > Home
• >
• Partnering for Success in K-12 Security

• Email this article
• Print this article

Partnering for Success in K-12 Security

By: Bridget McCrea

6/17/2008

When Van Dyke Public Schools was looking for a way to control what its 4,000 students were doing online, it approached several software vendors in the space. After reviewing its options, the nine-school system installed NetOp Tech Inc.'s NetOp School about two years ago.

"The district's teachers needed better computer controls in the classroom," recalled Joan Tallent, director of sales and marketing for SBS Security in Dallas. "They wanted to be able to correct what the students were doing online quickly, and without everyone else in the classroom knowing about it."

A NetOp certified product manager, Tallent has for the last two years handled the Van Dyke Public Schools account for SBS, a provider of sales, support and troubleshooting solutions for NetOp products. Since 2001, the firm has serviced corporate, government and educational organizations, and partnered with messaging systems security and compliance vendors.

NetOp School enables instructors to both monitor class activity and teach at the same time, and works by showing student computer activity in a thumbnail display on the instructor's screen, giving the teacher a quick overview of who is paying attention in class and who is not. The instructor can then send messages to remind students to stay on task, block certain programs, shut down the Internet or freeze the computer altogether.

Kathy Zainea is just one instructor who is already benefitting from the software upgrade. A teacher at Lincoln Middle School in Detroit, Zainea has had access to interactive classroom tools for about two years now, but it wasn't until a couple of months ago that she was exposed to the new lineup of options that she could use for instruction.

"I use NetOp School for so many different things," said Zainea. "Everything from displaying the class agenda and monitoring student activity to chatting with students to helping them better understand certain concepts or doing a demonstration using my own system. I even distribute my tests using the software."

Van Dyke Public Schools also use the software's advanced features to better interact with students. Using the chat function, for example, students can ask questions both in a public portal, enabling the entire class to view an answer to a common problem or in a private message to the instructor. To distribute tests and grades to their classes, teachers can click their computer mice and have the exams simultaneously sent to all students.