Protecting student privacy using Highlights IP restrictions Follow
In this article
What are IP restrictions?
Hāpara Highlights provides teachers with insight into what their students are doing online, in the moment - helping teachers guide students to appropriate use of their devices. Hāpara can restrict data collection and teacher visibility to appropriate times and places. Most schools only allow monitoring during school hours and only while students are connected to the school network.
If your Highlights configuration chooses to not implement IP restrictions, we strongly recommend implementing time restrictions, IE: only allowing monitoring during school hours at the minimum.
Risks of not setting IP restrictions
Without IP restrictions that limit Highlights function to your school network(s), teachers and administrators could gain inappropriate access to personal information. For example, if a student who is home sick connects to their school account, their teacher could see content from all of the tabs open in their browser - including material that may not be appropriate at school, or tabs opened by other household members with access to the device (ie. banking sites, etc.).
While it may be desirable for teachers to have visibility to student devices while they are off the school network, the privacy risks are significant, and we encourage you to enable IP Restrictions (see directions below).
Hāpara does not have enough information about your school network to enable this by default. We do recognize that there may be valid scenarios where visibility into student Chrome browsing activity off-campus is necessary for unique education situations.
How to enable IP restrictions
For more detailed step by step instructions see our full Highlights Installation guide here
- Check with your network provider/tech team to confirm any external WAN IP address(es) of the school network students connect to, these addresses are usually provided by your ISP. This is the IP address (or range) that all outbound connections to the internet originate from.
- Validate the above address by visiting www.whatismyip.com while connected to the student network. The IP address shown by Google should match an external WAN IP address.
- Open the Hāpara Admin Console and navigate to the Highlights (screens) page.
- In the Highlights IP Restriction section, enter each external WAN IP address (or range) that you wish to enable and click Save.
Notes
- Changes to your Hāpara Configuration can take up to 24 hours to update.
- Outside of the specified IP addresses, the Highlights extension will not be active on devices and will not provide details of activity on a device or support other Highlights functionality.
- With this setting enabled, students who are connecting their devices via a nearby open Wifi network (Starbucks, McDonald’s, mobile hotspot etc) will not be monitored by Highlights.