photo: cathy yeulet
robyn pearce
Great tools to keep our kids safe – and save time The cost – and convenience – are perfect for schools.
Teachers Matter
As
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a grandmother as well as a time management specialist, I pricked up my ears when a friend started talking about high-impact ways to block inappropriate web content for children, a vital form of protecting children from abuse. That initial chat opened up an interesting, cost-effective and time-efficient suite of technology services for not only schools but also the business world. And a side benefit has been that I also discovered another New Zealand export success story. Yet again, a small home-grown business is at the forefront of technology innovation on a global scale.
A brief overview This local business is Watchdog, www. watchdog.net.nz, the first ISP in NZ to provide filtered Internet access for families, schools and businesses. About two thirds of all schools in New Zealand are now using one or more of their services under a contract with the Ministry of Education. Their list of services is so comprehensive that I’ll just highlight a few. They supply both hardware and connectivity services, act as a filtering gateway and also provide a big range of other cloud-based applications.
A recent example of their global impact can be discovered on a small island in the Indian Ocean. The ICT Authority of Mauritius recently installed a national Internet filtering system for the island, aimed at blocking access to child sexual abuse (CSA) web sites for all Internet users. Trials of the system over a four-month period prior to the installation had logged 142,000 accesses to web sites containing CSA material from one ISP network in the country (population 1.25 million).
