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While the vast majority of education leaders would agree that students need to use 21st Century technology tools in order to gain the skills they will need to succeed in our fast-paced and ever-evolving world, they are nervous about allowing wholesale access to those tools on the Internet. Concerns about students being exposed to dangers like pornography, child predators, and cyber-bullying can prevent the progress in education that our students require to be successful in the future. But restricting today’s youth to conventional educational methodology is counter-productive.

Gaggle is the solution. Safe and secure communication has been our core competency for over 12 years. We focus on one thing and we do it well.

Compliances

Gaggle complies with all US privacy and safety laws, particularly those involving students/children. These include: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

CIPA

One of the important provisions of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) states that schools must have technology measures in place to protect against visual depictions that are obscene or pornographic. Gaggle is the only email provider capable of providing real time image analysis to detect and prevent pornographic images displayed through email. As such, we believe that Gaggle provides the highest degree of CIPA compliancy of any email solution on the market.

COPPA

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) is a federal law designed to protect the privacy of children under 13 years old. COPPA requires that Gaggle provide parents or legal guardians with notice concerning what personal information is collected from children and how it is used or shared. Individual children are not allowed to sign up for the Gaggle services. The only way a child may obtain access to an account on the Gaggle service is through their school. Schools sign up for a group account on Gaggle and then create accounts for specific students. Please click here to see our complete COPPA statement.

Student Filtering

Student activities in Gaggle are passed through multiple filtering systems that scan for inappropriate content. Gaggle provides an initial set of rules for these filters, and the school/district has the option of modifying and adding to the rules to fit their policies. Violations of any of the rules are sent to the assigned monitor for review.

Any teacher or administrator can be assigned as the monitor for student accounts. That educator will receive any blocked messages or other violation notifications that are generated by the students assigned to him/her. Blocked email, blog postings and comments, and message board postings can be unblocked if they are deemed appropriate.

Blocked Words: Gaggle filters email messages and attachments, as well as postings to blogs, message boards, chat rooms, and other activities for inappropriate language, including profanity, drug references, sexual references, and potential threats to student safety. We frequently update our lists to stay current on the constantly evolving slang and text-speak being used by youth today.

Anti-Pornography Scanner: The technology used in our Anti-Pornography Scanner analyzes the content of images and can distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate pictures. The APS has been engineered with total safety in mind. It decompresses and analyzes zip files, inspects embedded images, and even scans linked pictures and URL addresses in email messages, attachments, blog entries, and other Gaggle activities.

Blocked Domains and Addresses: Teachers and administrators can control with whom students can communicate. Student accounts can be restricted to email within their class, school, or district as a group or individually, or set to allow or restrict email to and from specific email addresses or domains.

Blocked Attachments: Attachments and Digital Locker files are filtered through our Blocked Word list and the Anti-Pornography Scanner, as well as scanned for viruses, but educators may also want to completely block certain file types to prevent students from downloading unwanted or dangerous files to school computers. Specific file types can be blocked according to school or district policies.

Settings and Controls

Educators can have a great deal of control over their students’ access and settings. Access to advanced features like message boards and blogs can be restricted within the class, school, or district, or turned off completely. Other examples of settings that can be controlled on a group or individual level include restrictions on the number of messages a student can send each day, how many recipients they are allowed to send a single message to, and who they will see in their Directory. Settings can be quickly and easily changed to address issues or as a student disciplinary action.

In addition to student and school-level controls, districts have the ability to set ceilings on the school and student settings to ensure that district policies are maintained.

Teacher Access

Teachers and administrators have access to student accounts, including their settings, email messages, and other activities such as Digital Lockers and Blogs. Rather than needing to know a student’s password to log in to his/her account, teachers can easily drill into their students’ accounts through their own Gaggle educator account.

Gaggle accounts are organized in a hierarchy that determines which accounts a user has the ability to drill into. Teachers can access students (either their self-contained class or all of the students in their school), school level administrators can access all users in their school, and district level accounts can be set to access all accounts in the district, or just specific schools.

Human Monitoring Service

Teachers’ time is a highly valuable resource, and although the monitoring of student accounts is not normally a time-intensive task, it is important that it be handled on a consistent and frequent basis, as it is not uncommon to catch messages that indicate a need for timely student contact or intervention. In order to ensure that student violations and notifications are handled regularly, Gaggle offers our Human Monitoring Service (HMS).

HMS assigns a Gaggle employee to be your first line of defense and handle the monitoring of your student accounts. Your teachers will not need to check blocked messages and other notices as Gaggle will review them and apply consistent, district-approved policies to any violations, while also keeping the district informed. In cases of student safety concerns, like suicide threats or violence, Gaggle immediately contacts the designated school or district contact.