Chromebook Content Filtering in the U.S. K–12 Education Sector
Geraldine Hunt
Keep Students Safe With AN Education Web Filter
The rapid digitization of education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote learning, has permanently transformed how students access educational resources. Among the most widely adopted tools in this digital shift are Chromebooks, affordable, easy-to-manage devices that have become a staple in U.S. K-12 classrooms. However, as these devices become central to student learning, ensuring safe and appropriate internet access through effective content filtering has become a critical concern for schools, educators, and parents alike.
Chromebook has the majority (51%) market share of the U.S. K-12 education market and is used by 50 million students and teachers daily worldwide.
As an incumbent technology in the classroom, Chromebooks act as an extension of the teacher, providing a platform to run digital education tools and offering always-on internet access for student-centered research. However, the freedom to learn must be tempered by the protection of minors. This is where Chromebook content filtering comes in.
What’s so Great about Chromebooks?
The accelerated adoption of Chromebook devices in K-12 schools fuels a demand for other technologies and encourages children to utilize the cloud for learning. Chromebooks offer compelling advantages that are not available with traditional laptops:
- Chromebook is internet-ready: the laptop is malware-resistant and has some protection against other software threats.
- The Chromebook is an affordable option for schools on a budget. The device is more affordable than traditional laptops or Apple tablets, making it easier to procure and distribute among schools with limited budgets.
- Chromebooks require minimal installation and configuration setup, so teachers and students don’t need excessive time or technical skills to begin working with them. The only skill necessary is familiarity with the Chrome browser.
- Chromebook overhead for deployments and maintenance is minimal. Software and storage are in the cloud, and Chromebook hardware is durable.
In recent years, school districts have been issuing Chromebooks to their students and faculty to help improve equity for underprivileged students unable to afford the necessary technology for advanced learning. Underprivileged students often lack access to essential internet services that can aid with homework and research, which significantly impacts their academic potential. Without the help of digital classroom options and extended tutoring, students tend to obtain lower grades, which can harm their future career opportunities.
A Chromebook is an essential tool for e-learning. However, a Chromebook laptop is not a complete solution. Students can use a Chromebook for open-access internet browsing, which may lead to access to inappropriate websites and social media sites. The result is that students are left unprotected, and the school is in noncompliance with regulations such as the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
Did You Know?
of K-12 institutions report experiencing cyber threats
of attacks start with a phishing email
data breaches hit U.S. K-12 schools in the last 10 years
surge in attacks against K-12 schools in 2024
Chromebooks: Internet Devices that Need Security Controls
A Chromebook is a general computing device and includes access to web content. This is important as students and staff need to access eLearning portals and other educational applications. The problem lies in the lack of filtering of online content; students may navigate freely to research information as well as inappropriate or offensive content.
Administrators must provide a balance that allows students legitimate internet access to suitable web applications while blocking them from inappropriate or disallowed content.
Without Chromebook content filtering, schools are placing students at risk from malicious and dangerous online content, while also putting themselves at risk of non-compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
Why Do K-12 Students Need Internet Access?
According to two studies, the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Program for International Student Assessment, test scores increased for students using the internet for additional tutoring help with homework and studies. A small amount of time was proven beneficial, but at a certain point, students experienced diminishing returns on their grade success if they spent too much time using the internet. Test scores dramatically dropped for students who spent six or more hours a day on the internet. At some point, researchers observed a ceiling beyond which increased internet activity didn’t translate into improved academic performance. Excessive internet use can hinder student success and diminish motivation for academic studies. Open internet access compounded the issue.
A balance must be found between the right amount of internet use and offline education.
Why Do Schools Need to Block Inappropriate Content?
The education of our children is one of the most essential jobs in society. Teachers and other educators are the custodians of our children’s future, and as such, they bear the weight of responsibility to guide children down a safe path. Schools have a responsibility to protect students from exposure to explicit material, violence, hate speech, and online threats. This responsibility is enshrined in U.S. law in the form of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
CIPA requirements include:
- Control of access to inappropriate content
- Safety of minors during online communications (including email and chat rooms)
- Prevention of unauthorized access
- Protection of personal data
- Monitoring of online activities.
How Can a School Filter Web Content on a Chromebook?
Web content filtering in schools that use Chromebooks and other devices must be seamless, flexible, and cost-effective. Any content filtering solution must be configurable and advanced, as it will need to block known web-based threats, zero-day and emerging threats, such as newly created domains hosting malware.
Internet filtering solutions for K-12 schools must check each website request against real-time block lists. These block lists include websites known to host inappropriate material or malicious software. The system administrator of the content filter sets the category and keyword parameters. These checks not only prevent minors from accessing material outlawed by CIPA but also safeguard computer networks from malware such as adware, spyware, and ransomware.
Real-time block lists can be obtained from internet safety groups or a filtering service provider. They are usually updated when websites are identified as hosting inappropriate material or malware.
However, blocklists are not the only layer of protection offered by advanced content filters like WebTitan.
Additional Protection from Advanced Web Filters for K-12 Schools
Advanced web filters provide layers of AI-enabled content filtering. WebTitan utilizes sophisticated AI-driven engines to leverage data from hundreds of millions of end-users as the source to generate a "threat corpus." This vast dataset is used to train human-supervised Machine Learning algorithms that actively update lists of dangerous URLs, including emerging URLs that are not part of known blocklists. AI-driven DNS filters can quickly adapt to the evolving cybersecurity landscape, blocking malicious content in real-time.
What if You Need Flexibility in a Content Filter?
In advanced Chromebook filtering for K-12 school children, the filtering parameters can be set by time. In libraries where an internet reservation system is in operation, it is simple to activate the filtering controls at the start of a child's Internet session and deactivate them when the child's session has expired. This function can also be applied in schools for after-hours studies, where it may be appropriate for K-12 school children to access certain types of adult material.
What About Malware and Phishing on a Chromebook?
Content filtering is one area of protection needed for Chromebook users. However, malware and phishing protection are also necessary for comprehensive 360-degree protection against internet-borne attacks, including zero-day and emerging threats.
While traditional .exe files can’t run on a Chromebook, the devices are vulnerable to Android malware and other threats that don’t depend on computer hardware (e.g., phishing or credential theft).
The internet is the primary attack vector for Chromebook exploits because Chromebooks are designed to work in the cloud with continual web access. Chromebooks run on Android, so exploits primarily target vulnerabilities in the Android operating system. Phishing, social engineering, credential theft, and other types of attacks, which focus on human error and behavioral manipulation, are primary threats to Chromebook users.
While Chromebooks may reduce the risks of some malware threats, this is not their primary focus, so the risk of compromise is not eliminated. Children are highly vulnerable to manipulation via web-based threats, so a security solution must be human-centered. Children cannot be expected to identify threats; therefore, a content filtering solution removes them from the equation.
Web content filters, such as WebTitan, are also designed to protect against malware and phishing, blocking access to websites infected with malware or those involved in phishing scams.
DNS Filtering On-The-Go for Chromebook Web Filtering
To help educational institutions meet compliance demands for content filtering and security protection, TitanHQ has developed our DNS Filter, WebTitan OTG, for Chromebooks. This affordable solution is specifically designed to meet the needs of the education sector. WebTitan OTG supports CIPA compliance and delivers user- and device-level web filtering, both on-site in the classroom and off-site at home.
WebTitan OTG for Chromebooks is an endpoint agent that connects to the TitanHQ WebTitan SaaS platform. It enforces filtering policies for Chromebooks, protects students through search enforcement, and supports CIPA compliance.
WebTitan OTG is Easy to Use
In the same way that districts are attracted to Chromebooks for their ease of setup and configuration, many TitanHQ DNS Filtering customers are drawn to the simplicity of the management interface. The web-based management console makes it easy for school administrators to set up content filters and deploy them across the district /school. TitanHQ provides exceptional support to administrators in the event of any issues that may arise during deployment and configuration.
TitanHQ DNS Filtering supports small and large educational institutions. Small and rural district administrators will appreciate that there is no significant learning curve and that it doesn’t involve complex deployment procedures. Our customers report that it’s easy to set
Internet Devices for Children Need Internet Filtering
Our developers built the browsing filter to keep the integration of web content filters convenient without complicating deployments of any remote devices, including Chromebooks. Rather than relying on on-premises or installed local client software, TitanHQ DNS Filtering redirects all DNS queries from remote devices to the TitanHQ DNS Filtering cloud system. Using DNS queries, we mitigate the risk of users turning off web filters on their local systems. TitanHQ DNS Filtering identifies and compares the queried domain to several blocklisting factors, including administrator configurations. If the domain is blocklisted, the user is blocked, and a message is displayed informing the user that the domain violates content policies.
All DNS Filtering activity takes place in the cloud, providing administrators with a centralized location to configure browsing filters, even when working from home. TitanHQ DNS Filtering was one of the first companies to offer a total cloud-based web filtering solution. Because no additional client software is installed, administrators don’t have the overhead of supporting a client application, malware bypassing restrictions, users disabling the software, or vulnerabilities in the client application.
Key Features of WebTitan for K-12 Schools and Districts
Flexible and Granular Policy Control for eLearning Groups
K-12 students' broad age ranges mean that any content filtering must be flexible enough to reflect the needs of each age group; DNS Filtering supports user groups by age, allowing administrators to configure policies based on group (or individual) permission assignments. For example, elementary students might need to open a game site for online math and reading, but it can be blocked for middle and high school students. School administrators may think that YouTube is inappropriate for elementary-aged children, but they can offer limited access to it to middle and high school students.
Many schools block students from using social media sites. However, school principals, parent coordinators, and other personnel need access to post news and events on the school's official social media account. Internal IT requires higher-level permissions to access technology sites, while students and staff need to be prevented from downloading admin-level tools and applications. The array of configurations needed in a modern school requires flexibility and granularity of controls in a DNS Filter. WebTitan OTG offers a dashboard that allows administrators to create groups with granular permissions tailored to the user's type and permission level.
Administrators can also override policies by assigning exceptions to users or groups of users. With TitanHQ DNS Filtering's Chromebook web filtering, administrators and parents can ensure that every student receives the appropriate internet access.
Reporting for Stakeholders and Administrators
At some point, a concerned teacher or parent might ask what sites one of their students or children has been accessing. Administrators can use TitanHQ DNS Filtering reports to generate a list of sites accessed by a particular student account.
Administrators and IT personnel can also identify broad behavioral patterns regarding student internet usage at the system and group levels. TitanHQ DNS Filtering identifies internet browsing habits, providing insights to distinguish between educational and inappropriate websites. Any new sites registered and found inappropriate for children can be blocked.
TitanHQ DNS Filtering also runs AI-enabled threat intelligence in the background to automatically collect and categorize new domains. TitanHQ DNS Filtering developers continually update our cloud-based software to improve its features.
Advanced Security for Safety and Risk Management
Content filtering is not the only threat to schools. TitanHQ provides advanced anti-malware and anti-phishing technology for Chromebooks. Our DNS filtering solution prevents students and staff from accessing malware-infected websites and navigating to phishing sites. Our AI-enabled technology is trained on a vast corpus of threat data, allowing the solution to detect emerging threats and zero-day attacks.
Deep and Seamless Integration of TitanHQ DNS Filtering Protects Students and Your Education Environment
WebTitan is a cloud-based solution that provides seamless integration with Chromebooks, enabling you to apply filtering policies to your Chromebooks and protect your users with safe search enforcement, while also supporting CIPA compliance. Any administrators unfamiliar with the TitanHQ DNS Filtering system can rely on our full support when using it.
TitanHQ is dedicated to making our highly successful web filtering architecture a beneficial tool for administrators to secure user Chromebook activity, especially with vulnerable children. While we cater to many businesses and managed service providers, we are also heavily partnered with K12 institutions across the globe to help with the evolving cybersecurity landscape.
Let us show you how TitanHQ DNS Filtering for Chromebooks enforces user protection and security while making it convenient for school administrators to manage Chromebook web filtering.
Sign up for a demo today to get started with TitanHQ DNS Filtering.
Geraldine Hunt
- WEB FILTERING
- EDUCATION
- SCHOOLS
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