What is Bark for Schools?
Available for free to all K-12 schools across the U.S., Bark for Schools provides a monitoring for Office 365 and G-Suite, Chrome, Chromebook and DNS filter.
Bark for Schools was developed as a response to the tragic Parkland shooting, as a way to help schools protect students online at no cost to them or their communities.
One year later, Bark for Schools had become the trusted partner of 1,000 school districts — with more than 80 joining every month.
Why is it free?
Bark for Schools was created because no school, child or family should have to go through many of the experiences we regularly see on the news each month. This is our give back program that is completely free for schools so we can do all we can to empower communities to keep kids safe online and in their community.
Who can use Bark for Schools?
Available to all K-12 schools across the U.S., Bark for Schools monitors G Suite and Office 365 for signs of cyberbullying, suicidal ideation, sexual predators, school shootings, and more.
What is Bark for Schools' DNS Filtering?
DNS filtering is a great alternative to more traditional hardware and software-based solutions for filtering the internet in schools.
The Bark for Schools' DNS filter works at your network level by redirecting traffic, based on the information associated with your schools router and the service supplier and so permitting administrators to filter by parameters via a web browser-based portal. Within Bark for Schools you can also view granular reports on usage within your school.
What is Bark for Schools' Chrome and Chromebook Filtering?
Our Chrome web filter will allow for whitelisting and blacklisting of any site, and offers the function to disable access to certain sites of a given category, at the browser or, in the case of Chromebooks, at the device level. We also provide up-to-date reports within Bark for Schools so that you can stay updated on your student's web usage.
Alongside this, we also provide details for site visits on a student level - empowering administrators to make informed decisions on student web traffic behavior.
You can find out more by clicking the button below:
How does Bark for Schools Monitoring work?
Context is extremely important to properly classify a conversation. Without context, computers are unable to determine whether a specific chat message is a joke or something more serious. Modern machine-learning developments have allowed us to use cutting- edge, deep learning techniques to internalize that context, improving our ability to determine whether a piece of text is a potential issue.
Our underlying network is based on a recurrent neural network (RRN) trained on custom word embeddings to aid in understanding the variations of child-speak. We also use a multi- label approach, which allows us to use the triggers from one abuse type towards another. The combination of this approach trained on billions of data points has allowed us to create a perpetually improving natural language processing (NLP) system.
We’ve heavily invested in a robust Data Annotation team in the U.S. that gives us the capacity to properly label tens of thousands of pieces of data each day. This labeled data is then fed back into a data ingestion process that trains the algorithms nightly. Our investment in this process has given us the ability to stay current with the variations in language, as well as the flexibility to adapt on the fly as we encounter new topics and phrasings
among student conversations.
Bark interacts with other solutions without issues on a regular basis. We pair well with other solutions because we are connected on an account level (Google, Microsoft) and are able to monitor directly with no additional access needed other than at the account level.
There is an entire team behind the scenes at Bark to help you and your Admins. Please contact us by going to your drop down menu on the upper right hand side of your dashboard and selecting "Support." Here you can book a call, review support articles and read more on our blog. You can also email our team at Help@Bark.us
Can I monitor staff with Bark for Schools?
Bark for Schools is not designed to monitor staff, our algorithms are designed and evolve to understand student / child communication. You can find more in our Terms of Service here:
How do I turn Bark for Schools on?
After setting up Bark for Schools, monitoring is turned off by default. To turn on monitoring for Bark for Schools, please access your account here: bark.us/schools/settings
And toggle the switch located next to the Organizational Units / Active Directories:
(Note: turning on top-level directories will not automatically switch on sub-directories, each unit needs to be turned on individually)
How do I get started with Bark for Schools?
Bark for Schools takes minutes to get set up, you can find our step by step guide here: https://help.bark.us/bark-for-schools/how-to-setup-bark-for-schools
What is G Suite's Confidential Mode?
Gmail Confidential Mode
The confidential mode feature in Gmail would allow students several new options when sending email.
These will include:
- The ability to create expiration dates
- Revocation of previously sent messages
- Additional authentication via text message to view certain emails
- Recipients cant forward, print, copy or download the email or it's attachments
Confidential Mode will be turned on by default for all G Suite users starting June 25th. Bark will not be able to monitor emails that are sent using the features of Confidential mode.