Classroom - How do I use Site Lock and Access Plans together?

Access Plans and Site Lock are two powerful tools to manage students’ access to websites during class. While both control what websites students can visit, they serve different purposes and interact with each other in a specific way.

Access Plans set up your main, session-long browsing rules. You can configure them in two ways:

1. Block sites: Prevents students from accessing the selected sites. They will still be able to visit other sites.
2. Allow sites: Allows students to access only the selected sites. They will be restricted from opening other sites.

Site Lock is a tool for temporarily restricting students to a website or collection of websites. Unlike Access Plans, which run for the entire session, Site Lock is intended for short, focused periods. 

Using Site Lock with an active Access Plan

When Site Lock is activated for a student or a group of students or the entire class, the current Access Plan (Allow-Only or Block-Only) is temporarily suspended for those devices and students are restricted to only the specified site(s).

Once Site Lock is released, the Access Plan automatically resumes control.

Let's see this rule applied with an example. Suppose your class has an active Access Plan that only allows access to these educational sites:

• docs.google.com
• mathplanet.com
• ck12.org

Now, you’d like students to take a pop-up quiz and note down their answers in Google Docs, but you also want to make sure they stay focused and don’t access other sites to look up answers. This is where Site Lock helps. When you turn on Site Lock for docs.google.com, three things happen:

• The current Access Plan is paused.
• Students are automatically redirected to Google Docs.
• They cannot access mathplanet.com or ck12.org for the quiz duration. 

When the quiz is over, you can use the Release tool to remove the Site Lock. This resumes the Access Plan instantly, restoring the browsing access to other sites in the plan.

Site Lock is ideal for scenarios like pop-up quizzes, tests, or when you only need to restrict an individual or a small group of students to a certain resource for a short time, giving you flexible, on-demand control over student browsing.