Bark for Schools — District-issued Account Monitoring

Klein ISD is proud to provide our students with access to technology that equips them with increased opportunities to bring learning to life and helps to ensure college and career readiness in a digital world and workforce.

Bark for Schools allows us to partner with parents in monitoring at home all of the content students are creating, sharing, and sending through district-issued Google Drive and Gmail accounts. In addition to our district’s Lightspeed internet filter, Secure socket layer (SSL) decryption, and other monitoring and security features, Bark for Schools helps further detect potentially dangerous situations that students may be facing both in and out of school.

Bark for Schools provides all of their monitoring for FREE as part of their give-back program and is available to all K-12 schools and districts in the U.S.

If families would like to monitor more of their child's online experience such as social media accounts and services not tied to Klein ISD, they can upgrade to the Bark for Families experience. Any family that converts to Bark for Families experience will receive a 20% discount.

Bark alerts let parents know why the online activity was flagged (depression, sexual content, cyberbullying, etc.) and include a “snippet,” which is a concise view of why Bark flagged this particular item, along with where it originated (Gmail, Google Drive, etc). 

Bark will also include a link to helpful tips on how families can talk to their children about the alerts. Parents and guardians can only view alerts for their children. The only time a parent would see another child’s name is if it was included in the message that is flagged, as in “Jessica said…”

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.

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.

There is an entire team behind the scenes at Bark to help you. Please email Help@Bark.us for assistance with Bark for Schools. If you have questions about digital safety and citizenship in Klein ISD, please check out kisd.us/digitalcitizenship or contact us at kleinisd.net/contact.

As part of the free Bark for Schools program, families are able to monitor their student’s school Google Drive and Gmail accounts at home alongside the district. Bark for Schools monitors Google Drive and Gmail accounts for ALL Klein ISD students regardless of if they have a take-home device or not.

Families will receive an invitation to create an account for the Bark for Schools Family Alerts Dashboard via email on October 10.  If a family accepts the invitation, the family will receive alerts if potential issues are detected in their child(ren)’s Klein ISD Google Drive or Gmail account.