In an increasingly connected world, where the technological environment is omnipresent, the French education system plays an essential role in training and preparing the younger generations to use and master new digital tools. This has led to the digitization of teaching resources and the widespread use of digital workspaces (ENT) to manage communication between schools and families...
Developing real digital skills in pupils goes hand in hand with ever-increasing use of the Internet at school, which places a huge responsibility on the school to protect children from the dangers of the web.
As long ago as 2009, a study carried out by the association La voix de l'enfant revealed that 80% of the children questioned used the Internet to do their homework, and that 87% of them had already come across shocking content while surfing the web. The rapid acceleration in the use of social networks such as Instagram, and the exponential consumption of YouTube videos, are posing serious difficulties for the filtering of internet content in the French education system. While YouTube can help to educate and entertain students, it also contains a great deal of content that is inappropriate for children.
Given this situation, what can be done in practical terms to preserve an optimal user experience without falling into the trap of untimely blockages? What are the specific requirements of the French education system?
Promoting responsible use of the Internet and the IT equipment made available to students is certainly one of the priorities of the French education system. To guarantee this web safety, schools cannot simply activate the control or protection functions contained in the web browsers of computers or tablets, but must take up 2 main challenges:
Our many years of experience with educational establishments have led us to integrate numerous functions into our web security gateway, enabling us to address these issues:
The main challenge is also to ensure compliance with French legal and cultural requirements, as well as with the prerogatives of the French Ministry of Education in terms of filtering content for minors.
It is therefore important to realize that each country has its own laws, and that the age groups for which certain content is authorized in France, in other European countries or in the USA are very different. The question of the sovereignty of the web security gateway is therefore essential, as the themes, policies and filtering categories associated with the different user groups and used in schools must be perfectly adapted to France. Schools cannot be content with generic categories sometimes proposed by international software publishers.
To meet these challenges, theuse of a centralized proxy server in schools is obviously the best solution, and is one of the official recommendations of the French education authorities for filtering Internet content for educational activities in the national education system. As all web flows must pass through the centralized proxy (or rather, the web security gateway, whose scope is much wider than the proxy alone), control over the sites consulted is guaranteed. What's more, the ease with which such a solution can be implemented considerably reduces deployment costs, thus preserving school IT budgets.
But what can be done when certain uncontrolled workstations are likely to connect to the Internet? In this case, the addition of a DNS filtering solution that intercepts the resolution of domain names by browsers will make it possible to filter Internet flows efficiently and in a simplified way, in order to block all types of threats or inappropriate access on all ports and protocols.
The final question schools need to ask themselves is whetheror not to activate whitelist web filtering in their centralized proxy. Unlike a blacklist, which contains prohibited sites, a whitelist contains all authorized web sites that users can access freely and safely while browsing the web. Trying to detect everything is not necessarily the best way to protect against cyber threats.
The risk would obviously be to use a whitelist that was too restrictive, which would only lead to abusive blocking and a degraded user experience for pupils, or even to risky behavior in the form of circumvention attempts... That's why it has always been a priority at Olfeo to continually enrich our qualified database of authorized URLs, which for over 15 years now has a web recognition rate of around 98% on first use, and is therefore perfectly adapted to the needs of national education establishments, in order to guarantee 0 risk for pupils.
