GoGuardian Parent
- What is it?
- Why?
- App Features
- Getting Started
- Web Filtering
- Pause the Internet
- Scheduled Internet Usage
What is it?
The GoGuardian Parent was created to help provide additional educational support to administrators and teachers by allowing parents to see what sites and documents their children are browsing and providing parents with additional internet controls at home.
The app gives parents a bird's eye view of the apps and websites that their kids are on most often and control over school-issued devices during out-of-school hours. With this information, parents can be made aware of what types of browsing behavior Washingtonville is seeing from students so everyone can better work together to encourage more effective internet browsing habits at home and at school.
Why?
By providing insight and controls over student browsing activity, the goal is to empower parents to take a more active role in their children's online learning. As part of this, we want to offer a greater sense of transparency with student browsing. We believe this will help bring a greater sense of accountability on both the parent's and the student's part. Additionally, we are hopeful that transparency and insight will increase the likelihood of productive student browsing habits on a more consistent basis.
App Features
- Top 5 summary of student browsing (apps, extensions, documents, and websites visited)
- Teacher interventions
- 30-day view of websites, videos, documents, apps, and extensions
- Ability to block websites on school-issued devices during out-of-school hours
- Ability to pause internet access on school-issued devices during out-of-school hours, either on-demand or at a scheduled time
Getting Started
Download and Open the App
Download the GoGuardian Parent available on the Apple App Store HERE or Google Play HERE.
NOTE: GoGuardian Parent is currently compatible with iOS versions equal to or newer than iOS 8 and Android version equal to or newer than Android Jelly Bean, v16, 4.1.x.
Once the app has been installed, find the application within the apps list and tap the icon to open it.
Enter email address for authentication
Once the application has loaded, follow the on-screen prompts to authenticate the application with your email address on file with the school's administration.
NOTE: If the message "Sorry, the email you provided can't be verified. Please try again or contact your school's administrator" appears, double-check the spelling of the full email address.
If it is correct, please contact the school or district's administration to verify the email is on file.
Email verification
After successfully entering the email address, a prompt will appear "Please check your email - Click the link in your email to log in."
Proceed to check your email on your mobile device and press the link within the email to complete verification. If the link does not work, use the PIN provided within the email within GoGuardian Parent to complete verification.
Review terms and conditions
After successfully entering the email address, proceed to read the terms and conditions for GoGuardian Parent by navigating to the bottom of the text box. After reading the terms and conditions, press the checkbox to confirm review of the text and press the "I Agree" button.
NOTE: If the "I Agree" button is not present and shows as "Read to the bottom" be ensure that the text has been reviewed by reading to the bottom of the text within the text box and press the checkbox to confirm the text has been reviewed.
If this does not work, please close the application, confirm the device has an active internet connection, re-open the application, and try again. If the issue persists, please contact the school or district's IT administration.
Explore GoGuardian Parent
After successfully signing in, choose a student account to review activity from the "Your Students" page. Depending on administrative configuration, you may have access to the following information depending on your school or district's configuration:
- A list of the student's top 5 Top visited domains and GSuite files.
- A count of how many times Teachers using GoGuardian Teacher have guided the student's browsing behavior by closing tabs, locking browsing, opening specified tabs, or blocking access to websites.
NOTE: This feature depends on the account's subscription status to GoGuardian Teacher and may be unavailable. - All browsing activity by domain logged within the Chrome browser for the student's managed Google account.
Web Filtering
-
From the homepage of the parent application displaying a summary of your child's browsing activity, press the middle icon at the bottom of the interface to open the Filters menu.
-
After pressing Filters, tap the blue button at the bottom right corner of the interface to add a website to block access to for your child's managed device. You can add subdomains such as mail.google.com or entire domains such as youtube.com.
Wildcard expressions are currently NOT supported by GoGuardian Parent. After typing the domain or subdomain, press the blue button Create to save the filter. It may take around 2 minutes or so for the filtering to take effect on a child's managed browser.
Note: It may take up to 2 minutes for student browsing to be affected by GoGuardian Parent filtering once a change is made. Filtering may not appear to be effective if a child stays on a webpage for an extended period without navigating to a different page of the site. The site will be blocked upon subsequent navigation.
-
Delete a filter by pressing the area to the right of the site and dragging it to the left. The row will be highlighted in red and will be deleted after being flicked to the left.
Pause the Internet
Pause the internet for your child
While your child is considered "out of school" (please consult your school's IT department or administration to determine when your child is considered "out of school"), you can pause the internet for a specified timeframe manually, or pause internet access on a specified recurring schedule.
Manually Pause Internet Access
-
From the homepage of the parent application displaying a summary of your child's browsing activity, press the fourth icon at the bottom of the interface to open the time limits menu.
- Press the pause internet button to view and select the desired timeframe from the preset increments to pause the internet for your child. It may take around 2 minutes or so for the filtering to take effect on a child's managed browser.
Note: filtering may not appear to be effective if a child stays on a webpage for an extended period without navigating to a different page of the site. Activity will be blocked upon subsequent navigation.
-
Once the internet has been disabled, the app will show a countdown to indicate when access will resume for your child along with an indication that the internet is turned off. Press the Resume Internet button to allow your child to continue using the internet as needed.
Scheduled Internet Usage
While your child is considered "out of school" (please consult your school's IT department or administration to determine when your child is considered "out of school"), you can pause internet access on a specified recurring schedule.
-
From the homepage of the parent application displaying a summary of your child's browsing activity, press the fourth icon at the bottom of the interface to open the time limits menu.
- Press the blue Add Schedule button at the bottom right corner.
-
Create a recurring schedule by specifying start time and end time of when the internet is to be disabled as well as the day(s) of the week you'd like the start and end times to apply to. Then click Create
Pro Tip: For overnight scheduling to pause internet during the late evening/early morning, create two schedules for each day - for example 8:30 PM to 12AM and 12AM to 7:30AM each day. You may want to consult your student's IT department or administration to determine when your scheduling will be effective based on when your child is "out of school."