Securly

Securly is the first web filter that has been designed from the ground up for schools. It is completely cloud based, takes five minutes to set up per district and costs a fraction of the enterprise solutions that schools are forced to pay for today. We solve the problem of "over blocking" in schools by allowing educators to safely use 21st century instructional tools such as Google, YouTube and Wikipedia in the classroom.

This blog from New Schools makes a good case for why NY Schools might want to use Securly:

http://www.newschools.org/blog/rational-edtech-exuberance

"I was in a NYC public school a couple of weeks ago hailed as a technology leader in the district ... In that same school, the students were initially unable to log on to the website NoRedInk because of the dated district internet blocker. The principal had to take time out of his busy day to call the district office to manually unblock the grammar site (obviously no Securly here!)."

Advantages over the status quo include giving teachers the ability to whitelist or bypass blocked websites (instead of having to do what the blog post above talks about), Safe YouTube, Safe Google, a whitelist only mode that enables common-core testing and the ability to seamlessly filter take-home 1:1 devices.

In the 6 months since launch Securly has been deployed in 100+ schools nation-wide.