Student wellbeing is suffering, in large part due to increased time spent online, and schools need smarter solutions to help protect students in their digital lives.

Linewize’s 2024 State of the Nation Report asserts that digital visibility “is one of the biggest barriers to children's digital wellbeing today, and it’s a very real blindspot in schools around the world.”

The report compiles data from leading authority sources, to give K-12 leaders insights into:

• What your students are experiencing in the digital world
• Where current blind spots exist across schools
• How to fill those gaps to protect student digital safety and wellbeing

Here are three essential takeaways for school districts and K-12 leadership this school year.

1. Generative AI is exacerbating cyberbullying

As generative AI entered the mainstream, young people quickly mastered the use of deepfake technology to create harmful imagery targeting their peers (and in some cases, their teachers). The ability to generate hyperrealistic images and audio of individuals can have serious, lasting consequences on victims. 

The report notes that 1 in 4 young people were affected by cyberbullying during 2023, and our own data through Linewize Monitor found a child involved in a potential serious cyberbullying, bullying or violent incident every 4 minutes.

Cyberbullying can have severe effects on a student’s mental health and self-esteem. Nearly 1 in 5 (19.2%) students stayed home from school due to cyberbullying, adding to an already-growing problem of chronic absenteeism since the pandemic.

Tackling next-generation cyberbullying requires next-generation technology. With the rapid growth of generative AI tools like image generators, schools need to be able to detect, react, and conduct timely interventions. This year, many school districts are prioritizing EdTech solutions that help them monitor and detect inappropriate uses of generative AI and other technologies.

2. Students are finding smarter ways to get around the filter

With students mastering technology at earlier ages, school filter avoidance strategies (like the use of VPNs and proxy sites) are expected to increase in 2024 and beyond.

Students not only have more ways to get around their school's filter, but the risks are even greater when they do. The report reveals that over the past year, young people viewed explicit and violent imagery “at exponential rates.” In a survey of US and UK teenagers between 16-19 years old, nearly one-third (29%) said they’d seen online content related to self-harm, one quarter (25%) had encountered extreme violence, and 12% had encountered extreme pornography.

It will be a priority for schools to ensure their filtering solutions give them granular control, flexibility, and can contend with the modern landscape. Content-aware filtering is quickly becoming a necessity, enabling districts to capture VPN attempts on new, uncategorized, and proxy sites. Hybrid filters that combine cloud and on-premise filtering will empower K-12 IT teams to track filter avoidance strategies on both managed and unmanaged devices.

3. Schools must prioritize visibility this year

Schools cannot count on students to speak up when they encounter something scary, harmful, or damaging online.

Consider the findings from two illuminating surveys: More than 25% of 9-to-16 year olds say they've had a negative online experience that made them uncomfortable or scared in the past year. Yet, only 11% of young people who had been exposed to inappropriate or harmful content had informed their parents or caregivers. 

Children aged 8-12 spend 4-6 hours a day on screens, and teenagers are now spending 3.5 hours a day on just social media alone. As students spend more time in digital spaces, schools must focus on tools that give them more visibility into those spaces, to avoid massive blind spots in student online safety.

This means going beyond URL-based filtering and monitoring of G-suite activity, to detect risks across social media platforms, chat applications, and more. These are the digital spaces where adult content, violence, cyberbullying, and bad actors can slip through even the best defenses.

With technology (and often, students themselves) moving faster than schools can keep up, improving visibility into students’ online interactions across all digital spaces will be crucial for K-12 education this year.