3 نقاط رئيسية:
- Lightspeed Filter now includes real-time bypass detection and blocking for Chrome OS, Windows, and macOS at no additional cost. Included with every Filter license, the feature has blocked more than 100 million proxy and game aggregator hits since launch, with detection logic updated as often as twice a week.
- The new Risk Indicators Dashboard in Lightspeed Alert gives counselors and administrators a proactive view of students trending toward higher risk. Rather than waiting for a high-risk escalation, the dashboard surfaces cumulative behavioral patterns and pairs them with Bob, an AI assistant that can answer specific questions about individual students or campus-wide trends.
- Lightspeed Insight’s approval management system now automates the full app vetting workflow, from teacher request to Filter enforcement. With workflow automation, customizable request forms, and custom app statuses added in the last few months, districts can replace manual coordination between curriculum teams, privacy reviewers, and IT with a single configured process that runs itself.
Every spring we hear the same thing from IT directors and district administrators: the tools are good, but there’s always more to do.
Filter bypasses are getting more sophisticated. Screen time questions are coming from boards and parents. App approvals are eating hours nobody has. And now AI use is in the mix, adding a whole new layer to monitor and govern.
This week, we hosted our annual summer product update webinar — 75 minutes, 50+ features, and a lot of questions answered live. Here’s the written version, covering everything we shipped across صف لايت سبيد™, تنبيه سرعة الضوء™, برنامج Lightspeed StopIt™, تقنية لايت سبيد إنسايت™, إشارة سرعة الضوء™, لايت سبيد MDM™، و فلتر لايت سبيد™.
Couldn’t make it? No problem! Watch the webinar on-demand here.
Classroom Management: More Control for Teachers, Less Overhead for IT
The question we hear most about Lightspeed Classroom is how to give teachers more flexibility without creating IT headaches.
The new teacher unblock feature is a direct answer to that.
When a teacher needs students to access a site that’s typically blocked (a research tool, a specific video, Wikipedia) they can now unblock it in one click, just for their active class session. When class ends, the site re-blocks automatically. No ticket to IT. No manual cleanup.
A few things IT admins should know:
- You configure which content categories are eligible for teacher override; security and CIPA-protected categories can never be unlocked, no matter what.
- Unblocks are URL-specific, not category-wide. Allowing social media as a category doesn’t mean unlocking Instagram opens all social media.
- Every override is captured in a full audit log.
Two other classroom improvements also shipped. Teachers can now check a student out of a class session temporarily — helpful for pull-out instruction, band practice, or in-school suspension — without removing them from the roster. And free time segments are easier to manage, letting teachers drag individual students into a browsing-permitted group on the fly while the rest of the class stays on task.
Student Safety: Smarter Alerts and Faster Interventions
Our safety team shipped a lot this cycle. Here’s where things stand for Lightspeed Alert and Lightspeed StopIt.
Risk Indicators Dashboard (available now by early access request).
Alert already flags eminent and high-risk events through our 24/7 human review team. The new dashboard adds something different: trend-based visibility. It surfaces students who are accumulating lower-level indicators over time, or whose pattern of high-risk alerts is starting to paint a concerning picture — before it becomes a crisis.
The dashboard is available to admins at the school level, not just district owners, so campus staff can act on what’s in their building without escalating everything up the chain.
It also introduces Bob, our Bot of Bots AI assistant built right into Alert. Ask Bob about a specific student (why is their risk score elevated, what did human review flag) and get a full context summary. Or go broader: show me trends at the middle school, what categories are escalating in seventh grade. It’s built to shrink the gap between data and action.
Additional Alert updates:
- SMS notifications for high and imminent escalations: available by request now; first responders get a text with no PII and a mobile-friendly incident view, even if they’re away from email
- Emoji detection: context-aware scanning across violence, weapons, drugs, and self-harm categories, with AI justifications explaining why a combination is flagging
- Multi-category flagging: coming June; cases will show all matched risk categories, not just the top one
- Staff scanning: coming June; an optional setting that applies the same AI review to staff communications, with human review calibrated for adult context
Lightspeed StopIt™ updates:
- Customizable crisis resource button: districts can now configure whether the in-app button connects to Crisis Text Line, a local telehealth partner, or another preferred resource, via SMS, phone, or web portal
- Consolidated usage dashboard: one exportable view of Stop It engagement trends, coming in June, built for board presentations and community conversations
Screen Time Data: The Numbers Your Board Is Going to Ask For
We started tracking a new screen time metric in Lightspeed Insight on January 1st of this year. The dashboard launched in April. (If you’re an Insight customer and haven’t found it yet: go to Dashboards in the top-left nav and select Student Screen Time Dashboard.)
You’ll see in-school and out-of-school time broken down by grade, plus a benchmark comparison against similarly sized peer districts.
Coming soon: native app screen time tracking for Mac and Windows, not just browser activity. The agents and browser extensions will work together, so whether a student is in Chrome, Edge, or a downloaded desktop app, you’ll get the same minute-level reporting across all of them. iOS isn’t supported yet, but it’s on the roadmap.
If you’re not an Insight customer, you can still get 14 days of your screen time data for free through our screen time audit — worth having in hand before your next board meeting.
App Approvals: A Workflow That Runs Itself
Lightspeed Insight’s approval management system has been a major focus this year, and three big additions landed in the last few months.
- Workflow automation: Build a routing sequence across teams — curriculum, privacy reviewers, principals — and app requests move through automatically. Quick approve and quick deny are built in for the obvious calls. Full audit trail throughout.
- Customizable request forms: Teachers submit tool requests through Lightspeed Classroom or a public list. You now control what questions they have to answer before the request hits your queue.
- Custom app statuses (released this week): Go beyond approved/not approved. Communicate nuance like “staff only” or “approved and recommended” directly in the tools your stakeholders see.
The end-to-end flow matters here: request comes in through Classroom or a public list, routes through your Insight approval workflow, and if it’s denied, it automatically blocks in Filter. No manual steps, no follow-up needed.
IT Visibility: Signal, Filter, and MDM
Signal is built around the idea that IT shouldn’t be the last to know — and these releases push that further. A few things that landed recently:
Lightspeed Signal™ updates:
- Shareable app status page: give staff a public view of app health monitoring so they can check it themselves instead of opening a ticket
- Outbound webhooks: push Signal events into Slack, Teams, ServiceNow, IncidentIQ, or any system via Zapier or similar
- Inbound webhooks (coming soon): trigger Signal actions, like Missing Mode, directly from external systems
- الأدوار الإدارية: distribute Signal access by function: devices-only, view-only, and more, without defaulting to owner-only
Bypass attempts are more creative than they were a year ago, and the pressure to keep up isn’t going away. Here’s what we’ve been shipping to stay ahead of it:
Lightspeed Filter™ updates:
- Filter Bypass Prevention: now available to all customers, included with Filter at no extra cost — available for Chrome OS, Windows, and macOS, with 100M+ proxy and game aggregator hits blocked since launch, and detection logic updating as often as twice a week
- AI Prompt Capture: available by request, full thread-level logging for Copilot, Gemini, and ChatGPT
- Policies 2.0 bulk management: make changes across multiple policies or collaborator assignments at once
- Policy exceptions system: coming soon, you’ll be able to stack partial policies on top of existing ones to create variations without duplicating entire policy sets
On the Lightspeed MDM™ side: we’re expanding beyond iOS to support all major operating systems, including Android and Windows. More details coming soon.
And the Lightspeed Rocket (our physical inline appliance for BYOD and network-level filtering) is coming back. If your network setup calls for rack-mounted hardware filtering, this completes the picture. Interest forms are open now.
Summer Training Is Available Now
Every product covered above has live training sessions scheduled this summer — Classroom, Alert, StopIt, Insight, and Signal. Sessions cover both new features and core product use, so they work for new staff and experienced admins alike.
See What’s Possible for Your District
If you want to walk through any of these features for your specific environment, we’d be glad to show you. اطلب عرض توضيحي and let’s build out the right setup for back-to-school.
الأسئلة الشائعة
How does the teacher unblock feature work in Lightspeed Classroom?
Teachers can unblock a specific URL for their active class session with one click — no IT ticket مطلوب. The unblock applies only to the students in that teacher’s current class, lasts for the duration of that session, and re-blocks automatically when class ends. IT controls which content categories are eligible for teacher override (security and CIPA categories cannot be overridden), and every override is logged in a full audit trail. Subsequent class sessions start من the standard filtering policy, so there is no lingering access.
Where can I find my school's screen time data in Lightspeed Insight?
Lightspeed Insight™ customers with super admin access can find screen time data by logging in, clicking Dashboards in the top-left navigation, and selecting Student Screen Time Dashboard. The dashboard shows in-school and out-of-school screen time broken down by grade and includes a benchmark comparison against similarly sized peer districts. Data collection began January 1st of this year; the dashboard launched in April. If you don’t see Dashboards in your navigation, an admin needs to grant you access. Districts not using Insight can access 14 days of screen time data through Lightspeed’s free screen time audit.
What is the Risk Indicators Dashboard in Lightspeed Alert, and how do I get access?
The Risk Indicators Dashboard in Lightspeed Alert™ is a new report that identifies students showing cumulative behavioral patterns that may يشير emerging risk — not just acute high-risk events. It surfaces students trending toward concern based on repeated lower-level indicators or multiple high-risk alerts over time, and makes this view available to school-level admins (not just district owners). The dashboard also includes Bob, an AI assistant that lets administrators ask natural-language questions about individual students or school-wide trends. The feature is currently available by early access request.
Is real-time filter bypass detection an add-on, and what does it actually detect?
Real-time bypass detection and blocking is included with Lightspeed Filter™ — there is no إضافي cost. It is currently available for Chrome OS, Windows, and macOS. The feature works through a helper browser extension that allows Lightspeed to analyze page behavior as the user sees it, not just at the network level. This lets it detect not only known proxy libraries (such as Ultraviolet and similar tools) but also behavioral indicators: sites that generate about-blank frames, obfuscated JavaScript variables, unusual network request patterns, and other techniques students use to disguise bypass activity. Detection is separate from automatic blocking, so you can review activity in your web activity logs before enabling auto-blocking category by category. Updates to detection logic ship as often as twice per week.
Can Lightspeed Insight handle app approvals for districts that aren't using Lightspeed Classroom?
Yes. Lightspeed Insight’s™ approval management system works independently of Lightspeed Classroom. Districts can create up to three public lists — customizable mini-sites hosted by Lightspeed — that show approved apps and include a request form. These lists can be configured for staff, parents, or students separately, and the request button can be added to whichever lists make sense for your district. When a staff member submits a request through a public list, it enters the Insight approval workflow just as it would from a قاعة دراسية integration. All approval decisions flow automatically to your Filter policy and to your public-facing approved app list.
What is the Lightspeed Rocket, and is it different from the SmartShield?
The Lightspeed Rocket is a physical, rack-mounted inline appliance that filters all network traffic before it reaches the internet. It uses packet inspection (specifically SNI analysis) to identify hostnames in unencrypted traffic, giving it full visibility without requiring decryption. The SmartShield achieves inline filtering through DNS rather than a physical device. Both approaches protect your network, but the Rocket is suited for environments with a strong preference for hardware-based solutions or BYOD setups where agent deployment isn’t practical on every device. The Rocket is expected to launch soon. Districts can submit interest forms now to receive updates as the release date approaches.
What summer training is available, and who should attend
Lightspeed Systems is running live training sessions this summer for all major products, including Lightspeed Classroom, Lightspeed Alert, Lightspeed StopIt, and Lightspeed Insight. Sessions cover both new features and foundational product use, so they’re useful for new staff getting started and experienced admins catching up on recent releases. Lightspeed Insight also offers open office hours for specific questions. Training is designed for IT directors, instructional technologists, campus admins, counselors, and threat assessment teams — essentially anyone who manages or responds within the Lightspeed platform.
