Chromebook Site and Settings Blocking

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’m in charge of a small number of Chromebooks, about a dozen, that are being used by students in an after-school tutoring program. The tutors help the kids use them for homework, and then they’re also allowed to do some fun edutainment stuff if they finish their school work early. Of course, kids being kids, they like to go out to YouTube and Facebook and such instead. So the lead tutor has asked me to help them block some of the more common non-education sites.

Up until January, there was a pretty easy way to handle this. Google provided for what are called “Supervised Users” to be set up on each Chromebook, and that’s how we had them configured. But…Google killed that feature. The only replacement appears to be setting up a G Suite for Education organization and registering the Chromebooks through that, which is a big investment of time and energy that is way overkill for our needs.

There are Chrome extensions that will block sites, but in order to install them I’d have to turn on the ability to install extensions (and modify other settings on the Chromebook). Which I’m sure would result in kids hosing up the network settings, or going to some gaming site and installing weird extensions, and other kinds of general havoc.

So, question to the hivemind - anyone know of a solution for Chromebooks that would allow me to A) block individual sites and B) lock down the settings so kids aren’t changing important stuff or installing rogue extensions? Or am I stuck with trying to go through the red tape of setting up G Suite for Education just for this feature on my Chromebooks?

2

In case anyone else runs across this scenario…I believe Google has (finally!) gotten their act together to replace the old Supervised User functionality on the Chromebooks. It’s called Family Link, and I did an experiment on one of my Chromebooks this week. I was able to:

  • Block a specific website (i.e. Facebook)
  • Prevent the “child” account from installing Chrome extensions
  • Block a “mature” website list (which Google provides)

So this functionality looks good, but of course there’s a catch. The way you set it up is to have a “parent” account on an Android or iOS device, which can then control the “child” account rights. This can only be done from a mobile device, not from a web browser. So we can’t use one of the Chromebooks or a laptop for the parent control account…we need a phone or tablet. I don’t want to use anyone’s personal device, since then changes can be made only from that person’s Google account - if we ever want someone else to do it, we’d have to redo the entire setup. So we’re going to have to devote some mobile device to a generic “parent” account that we use to manage Family Link.