Thursday, August 11, 2011

TrendMicro Online Guardian

My kids don't appreciate it, though they seem to understand the why of it. Our first year of online school my kids found that I wasn't always as observant as I should have been. So they'd finish an assignment (not all of their work, just the one) and then go play games or watch youtube. I eventually caught on, but didn't have an "easy" way of taking care of the issue (yes, they were punished, but I'm trying to retrain their habits, not teach them ways of avoiding being caught). Thanks to BZZAgent (yes, I'm an agent), I was able to test drive TrendMicro's Guardian software earlier this year. I have to admit, I really like it. I can control what they access and the times they have to access it (easy enough to change too). I can also skip the time limits and just have it tell me what they're going into. For the most part, I already knew it was YouTube, Wizard 101, etc. But I can actually see WHAT on youtube they're watching too.

It's a very straightforward interface. It will email you the reports, though you can view them online as well. It also doesn't seem to slow down anything as far as the network or the system goes with it's monitoring. I won't go into depth on the hows of it all, but will note it works (for me anyway).

I don't want you to think I'm being reimbursed or compensated for this in the slightest. I'm not. In fact, the campaign through BZZAgent ended a while ago, so this isn't even part of that. I just wanted other parents to know that this was an option if you wanted to monitor your kids online more.

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