GoGuardian Admin Product Update: Beacon Starter

Beacon Starter provides K-12 schools with valuable alert information on student online activity, allowing you to begin identifying students who are most at risk of suicide.

Beacon Starter and GoGuardian Admin go hand in hand

For years, GoGuardian Admin™ has provided K-12 schools with a web filtering solution that helps students stay safer while they learn online. We then introduced GoGuardian Beacon®, a suicide prevention solution designed to help identify students who are at risk of suicide and self-harm. GoGuardian Admin now comes with a feature of Beacon to identify and send alerts about students who are most at risk. It’s called Beacon Starter, and it’s included with our content filtering solution GoGuardian Admin at no additional cost.

Having recently undergone a substantial product upgrade, the new and improved Beacon Starter can help schools activate their custom student safety response plan by providing them with alerts of the most serious phase of suicide intent: Active Planning.

Beacon Starter’s advanced machine Learning monitors content on school-issued devices, offering schools a student safety solution for Active Planning alerts.

Online activity monitoring

You’ve always been able to monitor student web activity with GoGuardian Admin, but with Beacon Starter, you can monitor student activity for Active Planning suicide intent across search engines, chat, social media, email, web apps, and more.

Active Planning category

Active Planning is the most serious category of suicide intent, indicating online behavior and/or content may demonstrate the student is actively planning their suicide, such as looking up methodologies, suicide notes, etc. Once the monitoring picks up activity, you can get alerts for Active Planning.

With the latest updates for Beacon Starter, GoGuardian Admin now includes these new features:

Contextual alerts

With contextual alerts, you’ll be able to receive context around an event — including sources of alerts, screenshots, and browsing history. This helps you determine why an alert was generated so you can plan next steps.

Flexible notification options

An alert has been generated. What’s next? Flexible notification options enable you to create a multi-responder distribution list of the right school contacts. You’ll be able to send a broadcast email to all users on the list when an event happens.

Downloadable PDFs

Information is key. After an event, critical school staff, parents, and students may need access to the alert information. Beacon Starter’s logical, easy-to-read PDF reports can be downloaded and shared with other stakeholders.

Notes on alert details

Each alert now contains a notes section so you can document your team’s response to an alert in detail and quickly communicate with other members on what actions have been taken.

Why did we decide to include Beacon Starter in GoGuardian Admin?

Nearly 1 in 5 teens has seriously considered suicide, and suicide still remains the second leading cause of death among youth aged 10-24. These alarming numbers were behind our reason to create GoGuardian Beacon, but we also wanted GoGuardian Admin users to have a built-in suicide prevention tool where its most needed: to help identify Active Planning suicide intent.

Beacon Starter is included with GoGuardian Admin at no additional cost. To learn more, activate your free trial today.

If you are interested in a more in-depth student safety solution than what Beacon Starter offers, visit the GoGuardian Beacon page for our Beacon Core or Beacon 24/7 options.