WESince 2013, we have been helping schools train and protect staff, students and parents with our online safety toolkit BOOST. This toolkit enables education organisations to get their staff up to speed with the latest developments and issues around online safety, and offers a number of tools for dealing with online safety incidents, anonymous incident reporting, and managing online reputation.
In this time the toolkit has become an invaluable tool for schools who need organisations such as ourselves to keep up with the speed and ever increasing infiltration of the Internet into our lives. It is a credit to the expertise and knowledge of the brilliant team from SWGfL who work on behalf of schools with the police, social media companies, and other organisations to actively protecting children online.
The toolkit also won a BETT award in February this year (2015) in recognition of being “a very useful and innovative online safety solution offering good value for money”.
This success and recognition has spurred the team to work even harder to make BOOST the best toolkit it can be, and so over the last year we have completely redeveloped the toolkit as Online Safety BOOST which we launched last week.
So what’s new?
Friendlier Interface
The new tool repackages all the tools that were available in the previous version in a friendlier and more intuitive user interface, and has streamlined their use to make it quicker and easier to access.
Professional Development
Our online video guides are now better organised and have higher video quality.
BOOST Certification
We have rebuilt the entire certification process to make it much easier to access. Staff can access the online resources through a link that can be emailed to them through our interface, and the certification test is available for them to take when they feel they are ready. Track the progress of your staff as they take their tests and download their certificates.
Reputation Alerts
The biggest update to BOOST is a completely re-imagined reputation tool. This service is now built directly into BOOST, and offers an interface to add keywords, and track the number of posts over the past month, and see the sentiment and influence of those posts.
The reputation tool will also alert you via email when it finds influential content matching your keywords, so you can respond to the bad and promote the good. You will also get a daily, weekly, or monthly digest of the most influential posts along with your keyword performance over the past month.
Signup and Manage your Account Online
You can now signup for BOOST directly on the website, we also provide you tools to manage your account details, edit your organisation details, and create user accounts so other staff members can access and manage the account.
Access on any device
All the content in the tool has been designed to work on any modern web browser, be it a traditional desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Improved Security
We take the privacy and security of your data very seriously and have worked hard to improve the security on the website, we now employ stronger hashing algorithms for password storage, and have provided self-service mechanisms for signup, account management, and password reset to ensure that passwords are only known by the user. The website is now also transport encrypted with 2048bit SSL, which has been hardened against the latest security vulnerabilities.
You can visit the new website at https://boost.swgfl.org.uk/. We will be developing more content and features for BOOST over the coming year to make the service even better.
What do you think? If you have any comments on the new website and service, we would love to hear from you, please take our 60 second survey for a chance to win a years’ subscription to Online Safety BOOST!
