Webfilter Transition

Post date: Mar 17, 2016 7:16:9 PM

As you may have heard from your building’s tech coordinator, the district is transitioning over to Lightspeed’s Web Filter on March 18th. This transition will bring about many new improvements over our older M86 Web Filter. It will bring about improvements in safety and security since Lightspeed’s Web Filter has a dedicated team that works around the clock to update web filter definitions. Also, if students were to bring district devices home, they would be connected to our web filter. We will also gain the benefit of tightening the filter for the portions of our population that need it the most without affecting our staffs’ web experience. What does this mean for you? During the process of switching over, you may find sites that were once unblocked to now be blocked. This is not an expected behavior of the filter but it does sometimes occur. In the event of this happening, you can follow two easy steps (see tutorial) to request the site to be vetted and unblocked by someone from our team. For those of you who are on a Mac, you may have to authenticate within the site’s block screen which is also a two-step process (see tutorial) to receive a more relaxed filter profile. During the initial phase-in of the new filter, the BHBL Tech Staff and NERIC will be closely monitoring these unblock requests. We anticipate a rapid turnaround for unblocking requested sites

Upon request, we can provide teachers with a sample student login so if you have concerns that a site might be blocked for students, you can test it out before your class.

We appreciate your cooperation and patience during this transition. If you have any questions, please email me at msteinberg@bhbl.org

Thank you,Michael Steinberg