Perhaps nowhere in K-12 education are decisions about network security more important than in the day-to-day activities of schools' technology administrators--the ed-tech specialists who work on the front lines, supporting and protecting not only their school districts' networks, but also the administrators, teachers, and students who engage the digital world.

What do experienced leaders in this expanding and increasingly sophisticated segment of the education profession most want to communicate to their colleagues and the public about ed-tech security? For answers, eSchool News spoke recently with two ed-tech officials--Lloyd Brown, director of technology for the Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia, and James Culbert, a network security analyst for the Duval County Public Schools in Florida. Their districts provide thousands of students with laptop computers for educational use at school and at home.

Joining Brown and Culbert was Paul Myer, president and chief operating officer of 8e6 Technologies, a California-based provider of products for internet filtering, monitoring, and reporting. Robert L. Jacobson, senior editor of eSchool News, moderated the discussion. Following are edited portions of the transcript.

eSN: What you would identify as the most important internet security issues in schools today?

Myer: The biggest trend we've seen over the last year has been tracking behavior online, rather than just filtering it. Filtering is just the first step, and everybody needs to filter. But the shift we've seen is that school districts are a lot more interested now in tracking what people are doing and why, so they can plug holes in their policies and address the issues--whether it's students going to social-networking sites, or online predators, or open-source proxies. People just don't know what they don't know, so the ability to track exactly what's happening on the network is something that the enterprise has been concerned about for some time, and now education is taking the same tack.

Culbert: I agree. Within the last year, we have been concerned about authenticating our users and not permitting broad-based, anonymous internet access to our networks. We saw that it really didn't matter how much bandwidth we gave to high schools or middle schools. Students were simply going to use every bit of available bandwidth to surf the web. And we found that kids were not always going to sites that we had spent the money and the effort to make available. And it wasn't just inappropriate stuff that was the problem. It was stuff that was completely off task, with no real educational benefit.

So we added the authentication piece in our middle and high schools. We require all students, and all staff, to log on with unique user names and passwords, and to acknowledge our acceptable-use policy. They're notified every time they log on that their activity is monitored. And that has really caused the kids to move away from not just the inappropriate sites, but also the non-educational sites, and into more of the substance that we're interested in for them. So we have made the students accountable for their actions, and we've seen great results.