Item: GoGuardian Admin
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GoGuardian Admin

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize GoGuardian Admin as an additional layer of management and web filtering for our entire Chromebook fleet. This allows us to put some of the control of content filtering into the hands of individual teachers/programs, so that they can make decisions at any given moment on what websites should be able to be utilized by their students. We also have global policies in-place for no-nonsense types of things that students shouldn't have access to regardless of program.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Web Filtering
Chromebook Livefeed/Monitoring
GoGuardian Admin technical support is fantastic, and is always available
Ease of creating individual policies based on Google Admin Console OU

Cons

With the new Minnesota state laws regarding student data privacy - it made it somewhat challenging for us to continue utilizing GoGuardian Admin. However, they provided some updates to their software to address these issues.
GoGuardian Admin recently put out an option to checkbox COPPA/CIPA compliance verifications for web filtering. It seems that this still needs some work, as several educational websites we utilize are coming up as "uncategorized" - and then are being falsely flagged and declining access.

Return on Investment

Our small team of only three Helpdesk technicians can manage nearly 1200 Chromebooks regardless of if they're in one of our buildings or taken home by a student. Web filtering can now successfully be vetted on and offsite for all students - keeping us compliant with state and federal law.
Stacking this on top of the Google Admin Console allows for two layers of web filtering to occur, which provides us with peace of mind.

Alternatives Considered

Not as robust as the Google Admin Console, but has plenty of features we like, and utilize - to keep kids safe online.

Key Insights

Do you think GoGuardian Admin delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GoGuardian Admin's feature set?

Yes

Did GoGuardian Admin live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GoGuardian Admin go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GoGuardian Admin again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

GoGuardian Admin has been a fantastic tool for my team to leverage maintaining over a thousand deployed chromebooks district-wide. That said, it's not perfect. It seemingly works better if you manually control access to needed websites - rather than the newly released COPA compliance model, as several websites are incorrectly blocked. But I have faith that these issues will be addressed and remedied in due time.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

GoGuardian Admin Adapts To Newly Imposed Minnesota Laws