A Social Network Monitoring System for Teachers & Parents

Stephanie Valentine , Karthik Gopavaram , Janelle Arita*, Anshul Gupta Department of Computer Science and Engineering *Department of Visualization Texas A&M University valentine@cs.tamu.edu, krg8571@cs.tamu.edu, jarita07@tamu.edu, anshulg@tamu.edu
ABSTRACT

An increasing number of children are engaging in online social networking today. Most of the new technologies directed specically toward children take the form of virtual worlds, networked games and project-sharing sites and are primarily concerned with making money. These technologies rarely consider the childrens development and education as a priority. Also, due to lack of viable options, many children lie about their age to participate in age-restricted online forums and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This behavior has raised concerns among parents and teachers as it exposes children to inappropriate content, cyber-bullying and online predators. These issues and concerns motivated the development of Project KidGab, a non-commercial childrens social networking and educational tool that involves teacher and parental monitoring for childrens safety. In our project, we develop a social network monitoring system to aid and enhance the monitoring capabilities of parents and teachers in KidGab. The monitoring system, built as a plugin to KidGab, collects and analyzes several key usage statistics and alerts unusual activity patterns and trends in real time. The developed monitoring system greatly reduces the cognitive load on teachers and parents and makes KidGab viable for in-class use.
Author Keywords

develop a social media and social networking tools for use in elementary-school classrooms. Most technologies geared toward children are designed with commercial concerns and do not incorporate child development and education as priorities. Instead of having such commercial technology drive and dictate how children will interact and learn, Project KidGab will facilitate peer-to-peer and student-teacher interactions to scaffold learners through their rst dive into cyber-citizenship while simultaneously helping learners to develop socialemotional, communication, and problem-solving skills. With privacy, safety, and monitoring mechanisms built-in, KidGab will be one of the rst social media systems designed specically to meet the safety and developmental and learning needs of children. The major contributions of this project (as a whole) are to demonstrate, through development and evaluation studies, that KidGab is a viable mechanism for children in the primary or elementary grades to interact in purposeful, supportive, and educational ways with peers, parents and teachers. The question we investigated in this semesters work is that of the aforementioned supporting and monitoring mechanisms. Because KidGab will become a sort of digital playground for students, thorough monitoring capabilities need to be provided to teachers and parents to ensure kids are using KidGab responsibly and safely.
PRIOR WORK & CURRENT SOLUTIONS Social Networking Services

Social Networking, Child Computer Interaction, Social Network Analysis.

ACM Classication Keywords

H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): Miscellaneous

INTRODUCTION

We live in a time when we can no longer dismiss or ignore the ubiquitous use of online social networking and technology in childrens lives. Social networking has become the new medium of self-expression and communication, but childrens social skills are not yet mature enough to handle the interactions safely. For that very reason, there is an urgent need to
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There are currently numerous social networking services available to the public that are being accessed on a constant basis. Some of the most popular networking services such as Facebook [2], Twitter [8], Google+ [3], Instagram [4], and MySpace [6] contain millions of registered users. These services all require the user to register a free account which then connects them to other registered users. Users can share information publicly or privately as well as view information posted by others. These networking services make it very easy for users to connect socially with one another.
Disadvantages of Social Networking Sites

A disadvantage to using one of the mainstream social networking services is its safety for users, especially users at a young age. Most services require an age limit of 13 years old, with a few services such as Twitter [8] being open to all ages. Children under 13 years old are protected by the Childrens Online Privacy Protect Act (COPPA) so a childs information 1

cannot be shared and collected without parental consent. It is also there to protect kids from online predators and help parents control their kids online exposure. Although there is an age restriction to most of these services, children under the age of 13 are still creating accounts by entering in a false birth date and exposing themselves to the harm that COPPA is trying to prevent [10]. In fact, 38
Social Media Monitoring Service

To help combat these safety problems for children, there are various social media monitoring providers available for parents and teachers to monitor online activity. Geo Listening is a social media monitoring service that specically works with schools to monitor students activity [11]. Geo Listening is currently monitoring 14,000 middle and high school students in the Glendale Unied School District for $40,500. They monitor all public activity on social media services such as Facebook [2], Twitter [8], Instagram [4], and blogs using keyword searches. Any illicit activity in the categories of bullying, cyberbullying, despair, hate, crime, vandalism, substance abuse, truancy, or suicidal thoughts, get reported to school ofcials and left for the school to take matters into their own hands. Geo Listening is looking to monitor up to 3,000 schools by the end of 2013 [11]. The benets of a school using a provider like Geo Listening is that it will help to protect its students. In addition to schools being able to follow up on inappropriate activity, students will be encouraged to act as better internet citizens while knowing that their activity is being monitored [11]. Despite the benets of using a social network monitoring provider, it still has its limitations. In addition to a costly fee, it still is a service on a public social network where students can connect with anyone. It is not a service on a social network restricted to a community of trusted adult mentors
School-Based Social Networks

Figure 1. eaglespace prole page.

classroom. Teachers can communicate, conduct, and assess assignments out of class time. The ability to post questions and conduct polls offer tools that allow teachers to monitor student progress. However, due to the network being built on SocialEngine [7], an open source platform, there are limitations on how effectively teachers can monitor their students. A major limitation is its lack of summarization of student communication. Displaying some sort of summary on the interface would help teachers easily monitor student activity without having to parse through large chunks of information. Currently with eaglespace, depending on the amount of students and how often they post, it could take a signicant amount of time per day to monitor student activity. Additionally, there would be a lag time between a student making a post and the teacher discovering and responding to the post if it happens to be inappropriate. Current school-based networks, like eaglespace, offer a great tool as a social network, however, they still lack capabilities that make it an intelligent system for teachers and parents.
Learning Management System

A school-based network differs from a public social network in regards of access and accountability since it is a private network that can only be accessed by people in the school system. A benet of having a private network is the safety for students. Southwest Christian School is an example of a school that has already implemented a social networking system into their curriculum [13]. Their network, called eaglespace, is comparable to Facebook [2] and MySpace [6] except that it is a private network limited to students, teachers, and administrators of the school. Students can create a prole page (seen in Figure 1), share personal information, and post comments, pictures, and videos. Within their network, there is no privacy. Everything posted is public to eliminate suspicion of inappropriate activity occurring between an adult and student. In addition, friendships are not required between individuals in order to communicate and share information on the network. The network is also subdivided into 3 groups: elementary, middle school, and high school. Subdivisions help keep students in a social network that is within their age group [13]. In addition to eaglespace offering a social network for its students; it also offers as an education extension beyond the 2

Learning management systems are also widely used in current school systems as it is specically created for educational purposes. One of the most widely used learning management system is Moodle [5]. Currently there are over 70 million users registered in over 7 million courses [5]. Moodles popularity is due to the free cost and the general ease at implementing the system into school networks. The benets of using Moodle is that it offers an online network for classes. Some general things that students can do are submit assignments, make discussions on its forum, check grades, take quizzes, and download les. Moodle also offers the ability for its developers to add on plug-ins for specic functionality, such as content ltering. Essentially, Moodle offers a nice educational network for students and its teachers. Moodle, however, is not meant as a social network and its interface is not as appealing and user friendly for its users. The bland design does not compete with social network interfaces such as Facebook [2] and Instagram Instagram.
OUR SOLUTION: KIDGAB

KidGab is a social network built atop the BuddyPress [1] framework. BuddyPress is a plugin for the popular open source blogging software, WordPress [9], that facilitates basic social networking proles and communications. WordPress,

face to summarize the vast, noisy, unstructured and dynamic communications that happen on a daily basis. The cognitive toll on a teachers mind is already immense, and we do not want to force teachers to sift through every communication made in order to monitor the site. However, it is imperative that they monitor the activity in order to recognize negative behavior such as cyber bullying etc. Also, it is difcult for a teacher to track and identify changes in activity patterns and unusual activity trends for each kid. Example unusual activity trends might include a child who is active on KidGab that all of a sudden stops interacting or a child suddenly has a very high frequency of incoming posts compared to the outgoing ones. The teachers and parents need to be alerted in the above situations. Therefore, our goal was to develop an activity analysis system for the teachers and parents and the main focus was on addressing the following challenges: What to track and summarize? BuddyPress, and all other plugins are written in a combination of PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. An example prole page in KidGab can be seen in Figure 2. KidGab is more similar to Twitter [8] than to Facebook [2] or MySpace [6]. Posts may reference other users using @username tags, but the post inherently belongs to the poster, not the recipient. This means that every post made by a specic user (lets call her Wanda) appears on her own page, as well as on the pages of those friends she referenced. We think this will give Wanda a sense of ownership of and responsibility for the things she communicates, thus (hopefully) lowering the frequency of cyberbullying and increasing cyber-citizenship (this is a topic in need of further experimentation). Communications on KidGab can be textual (linguistic) or pictorial (sketched). KidGab provides a tool called FigurativelyCanvas, which allows users to sketch pictures and share them with one another (using the same @username capabilities mentioned above, though it is automatic in most cases). FigurativelyCanvas records all actions completed while sketching including changing background color, undoing an action, redoing an action, clearing the canvas, and, of course, sketching shapes. When Wanda is nished with her drawing, she will post the sketch. When she pushes the play button on her post, her sketch will be played back to her as an animation - action by action. This playback provides a temporal dimension that we believe creates a richer communication medium than simply providing the resultant two-dimensional sketch (this is a topic in need of further experimentation). This playback process also allows children to create simple animations, thus providing them an opportunity to practice temporal planning. Teachers and organization leaders may create Group pages in order to allow communication and conversation regarding specic topics, such as math class, student council, Parent Teacher Associations (PTA), etc.
The Need For Usage Summaries

Figure 2. A prole page in KidGab.

How frequently to summarize? How to track, analyze and make inferences from the activity data? How to intelligently display the ndings to the teachers and parents?
What to Track and Summarize?

The tracking metrics we chose needed to provide the teachers and parents important insight and information about the activity of the individual kid and the group (a teachers class) as a whole. The teachers and parents need to be alerted about negative comments. They also need to be notied about major changes in a kids activity pattern or unusual activity trends. The parents and teachers might also want to know the topics that are currently popular among kids. For example, the math homework for that particular week might be a popular topic among kids. Based on what the kids are saying about the homework, the teacher can learn and make changes if the homework was uninteresting, too easy or hard etc. Therefore, the following metrics should be tracked to meet the above mentioned requirements: Major changes in activity patterns of a child Unusual activity trends on a childs prole The popular and trending terms and topics The terms associated with negative sentiments or emotions Volume of mentions for the chosen terms and topics The exposure based on how many children are seeing and mentioning the chosen terms and topics The above metrics should be analyzed in further detail to study the reasons and factors responsible for the popularity of certain topics and comments. Also, the inuencers play an important role in the distribution of a message. For example, after a child (inuencer) with a large number of friends has posted a message, his/her friends could also repost the 3

With all of these communication outlets available to students, teachers, and parents, it is imperative that we provide an inter-

message and amplify that particular topic or message. Identifying the inuencers helps teachers and parents recognize the trouble makers (negative comments or behavior) and the good samaritans (positive comments or behavior). It is important that the teachers and parents are made aware of the kids responsible for starting and spreading negative comments and behavior such as bullying etc. Therefore, the tracked metrics should be drilled-down to collect additional information such as: The context, emotional content and timing of the topic or message The key inuencers (popular kids) The kids who provided the biggest exposure to the topic The kids who originated the message, propagated it and made it widespread.
How Frequently to Assess?

to track all the metrics. Each metric implements a custom algorithm to identify and extract the information. For example, Jin et al. have proposed LikeMiner to track the popularity of topics and messages. The like/favorite button has become ubiquitous and is a very popular social function on the internet [12]. KidGab provides the option to favorite a message, photo, sketch etc. The kids click the favorite button to express their interest or opinion on a certain topic or message. Tracking the messages and topics with the most favorites can help nd the popular and trending topics. Finally, sentiment analysis to automatically extract opinions expressed in the content is extremely difcult. It is because language is ambiguous and requires context and knowledge of the world. To summarize, the main challenge of this work was to study, analyze, customize and implement algorithms to meet the systems requirements.
INITIAL FRONT-END DESIGN

The goal is to alert the parents and teachers about negative trends and behavior at the earliest possible time. The messages and popular topics should be tracked minute-by-minute to alert the teacher and parents about negative behavior such as bullying posts in real time. However, changes in activity patterns need to be tracked over a longer timeframe to make concrete inferences. A day-to-day tracking of activity spikes and dips is not a good indicator for unusual activity and will result in a high number of false alarms. The system risks losing credibility with a high false alarm rate and could lead to teachers and parents not paying enough attention to the systems notications. Therefore, a day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month tracking is ideal for predicting changes in activity patterns and reducing the false alarm rate. Finally, the teachers and parents should have the exibility to view the trends over time or drill-down to shorter timeframes. Therefore, the teachers and parents should have the option to look at day-by-day data for the past few weeks or week-by-week data for the past few months.
How to Assess?

In this section, we describe our initial designs for the frontend component of our monitoring system. The front end to display the ndings is simple and highly functional. It is technically sound, visually coherent and incorporates good web design features such as effective visual aids, effective use of whitespace, etc. The different elements on the web-page are obvious and self-explanatory. If the design were not intuitive, the teachers and parents would nd it hard to comprehend how the system works and may refrain from using it. A clear structure, moderate visual cues, and logically categorized information reduces the cognitive load on the user and makes it easier to grasp the system. It also makes navigation simple and helps users nd their path to their goal easily. More specically, we wanted to design the system such that parents and teachers (not students) will have the ability to view an organized summary of student usage. The user can access this information by searching for a student through the search bar as seen in Figure 3 or going directly to the students prole page and selecting the Activity Summary tab. The Activity Summary section will display the data for that individual student through ve categories: Overview, Posts, Comments, Communication, and Time. Figure 4 shows our initial design of the Activity Summary view. The Overview section will be the initial category shown to the user. A bar graph will display the data of the other four sections. In the bar graph, the data will be organized by time: today, yesterday, this week, and this month. To view a more detailed version of the data, the user can switch to one of the other categories by clicking on the text links. When clicked, the user will see the data organized by time for that category through graphical and numerical representations as shown in Figure 5. The user can further see additional information by clicking on the blue text labeled as Today, Yesterday, This Week, and This Month. Clicking on one of the options will expand the page and display data such as the posts made today and yesterday for that user as displayed in Figure 6.
FINAL FRONT-END DESIGN: A TOUR THROUGH OUR COMPLETED SYSTEM

The main focus is to address the algorithms and technology required to build a functional activity analysis system. KidGab is built on top of the BuddyPress framework which itself is a WordPress plugin. WordPress and BuddyPress are developed in PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is a good design practice to develop an independent component and integrate it into the existing system. The independent component provides several advantages in terms of exibility, scalability, reusability etc. It provides the option to turn on and turn off the functionality when required. The independent component is also not affected by any changes or upgrades to BuddyPress and WordPress. Therefore, the activity analysis system was developed as a plugin to KidGab. We developed the plugin in the server side scripting language PHP. The system accessed and managed the database using SQL. We developed the frontend in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The above described monitoring system requires data mining and machine learning techniques to track and analyze the chosen metrics. There is no universal algorithm in prior works 4

Figure 3. Initial Design: How a teacher would search for a student.

Figure 5. Initial Design: How a teacher or parent can track a students posts.

Figure 4. Initial Design: A teacher or parent can see a graph of a students activity.

Figure 6. Initial Design: If the parent or teacher wants to see the posts, he/she needs only click on the time period he/she is interested in.

The student summary information is organized by each individual student and shared in the User Summary tab of the user prole page. Each student has a User Summary tab on his or her prole page that displays a summary of the students activity usage. Upon accessing the students prole page and selecting the User Summary tab, the admin will see the ve category options: Overview, Posts, Comments, Communication, and Time. The user can access the different categories by selecting any one of the button options. By default, the button selected will be Overview. Figure 7 shows the ve buttons in the User Summary tab for Janelle Aritas student prole page. Within each category, the section displays a bar graph summarizing the data for that specic category. Data within each graph is organized by time period: Today, Yesterday, Past 7 Days, and Past 30 Days. Figure 8 shows the bar graph displayed in the Overview section. The data is organized by time and currently displays the data for Posts, Comments, and Communication as it is not yet connected to display the data for Time. Furthermore, each category is visually represented by hue. Posts is designated a coral hue color; Comments has a green hue; and Communication is assigned a purple hue. Separate color hues for each category helps the user to better process the information. Under each graph contains a Show/Hide Table Data button. Clicking the button will either show or hide the table containing the average values of the data for the bar graph. Figure [9] shows the table for Janelle Aritas activity summary. By default, the table data will be hidden. The information in Posts, Comments, and Communication is further organized by two categories: to user and by 5

user. The information is separately summarized through two columns under each graph. In the Posts section, the information of posts to the student and by the student can easily be viewed as seen in gure 10. The left column under the graph shares posts by user and the right column shares post to user. The summary is organized by time period for each column and shares the number of posts made within that time period. In addition, each time period (Today, Yesterday, Past 7 Days, Past 30 Days) is a hyperlink. The user can further click the link to expand and collapse the section to view the posts that the student wrote. Upon clicking the hyperlink labeled as Today, the user can see any posts made today by that student. For example, Figure 11 shows the post Janelle Arita made today (November 26, 2013) if the link labeled as Today were clicked. If the user were to click any of the other hyperlinks, the section would expand as well to reveal the posts made either by Janelle or to Janelle. The Comments section is similar to the Posts section. It also contains the same structure of a graph at top and two columns underneath. The column on the left shares comments by the student and the right column shares comments to the student. In addition to showing the comments made by student and to student after expanding the time period section, the user can see additional information about the comment by clicking on the View hyperlink as shown in gure 12. It will take the user to a new page showing the posts or comments that the student made a comment on. Figure 13 shows the new page that contains the comment/post that Janelle Arita commented on. The Communication section also shares the similar page structure as Comments and Posts. The left column dis-

Figure 7. Final Design: Janelle Aritas user summary information

Figure 9. Final Design: Usage overview table data

Figure 8. Final Design: Usage overview bar graph

plays the amount of people the student communicated to and the right column displays the amount of people who communicated to the student. Like the View hyperlink in the Comments section, the user can see additional information about the communications made by clicking the View Conversation link. Clicking the link will take the user to a new page that shows all the comments and posts made between those two users. Figure 14 and 15 shows the View Conversation link in the expanded sections and the new page that the link leads to. In addition to this layout, the system is designed to display a ag at the top of the User Summary page when needed. The system tracks the ratio between incoming and outgoing for today and yesterday. Whenever there is a drastic change in ratio between incoming and outgoing or a change in today and yesterday, the student will be agged. Figure 16 shows that Stephanie Valentine was agged because both her ratio of incoming and outgoing posts for today and yesterday spiked. The user viewing Stephanies activity summary section will immediately see the ag and can take further action to pursue if there is any illicit activity occurring such as bullying. In this section, we described the usage data and the methods we have chosen for displaying it. The following section describes the procedures we took to gather and store that data.
BACK-END DESIGN Activity Analysis Engine

Figure 10. Final Design: Posts section

The activity analysis engine serves as a controller which is responsible for mining statistics from the children activities stored in the database and making it available for presentation to the front end. Figure 17 shows the high level diagram for the communication between activity analysis engine and other parts of the system. First component of the activity analysis engine is a PHP component which communicates with the parent/teacher front end view. The other component will be written in PHP+SQL which will fulll the use case of mining activities according to the use cases and the associations between users. Figure 18 explains the associations between the users. Teachers have the ability to monitor and view the activity of students enrolled in their class. Multiple teachers can have access to view a students activity. However, a parent will have the ability to view only their own childs activity. Teachers and parents can view the students statistics such as: The total number of posts (posts made by them and directed to them). Who they communicated with and how many communications were made. 6

Figure 13. Final Design: Page showing what Janelle Arita commented on

Figure 11. Final Design: Posts by Janelle Arita

Figure 14. Final Design: People Janelle Arita communicated to

Figure 12. Final Design: Comments by Janelle Arita

Who communicated with them and how many communications were made. How many comments on their posts How many comments made by the student The amount of time spent on KidGab Parents and teachers can also view more detailed information such as the the actual posts and comments made by the students, the communication between students etc. And nally, unusual activity trends and patterns on a students prole will be agged.
Database schema

posts, likes etc) and value is the mined statistic for the corresponding key. We are storing timestamp so that we can synchronize the mined statistics to the childrens usage patterns. The ag column will be used to point out the children whose activities on KidGab seems unusual to the activity analysis engine. The following table will be accommodated in the existing KidGab database schema.
WORKFLOW OF THE SYSTEM

Figure 19 shows the system sequence for monitoring individual student use case. The main layers of the system are the user interface (GUI), activity analysis engine (AI) and the database (DB). To monitor a students activity, the teachers rst go to the students prole. They then click on the User Summary tab. The GUI triggers a call to an AI function with the UserID information of the student. The AI in turn queries the student stats table of the database with the given UserID. The returned values are then processed and displayed. Similar procedure is followed when the teachers request to view additional details about the mined statistics.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

The database table which will store the mined statistics is formatted as seen in Table 1. The stats column is a string of key-value pairs. Here the keys will represent name of the statistics(e.g. total number of
Column Name Data Type

We propose two experiments to test the usability and functionality of our monitoring plugin to Kidgab. First, we will conduct a controlled laboratory study, followed by an in-thewild study in an elementary classroom.
Laboratory Study

user id timestamp stats ag

integer datetime blob integer

Table 1. Database table makeup.

Our laboratory study will have as participants adults who serve in a mentoring context to children. Target participants may be teachers, school administrators, coaches, scout troop leaders, youth group leaders, child care professionals, etc. 7

Figure 15. Final Design: Page showing conversation between Janelle Arita and Anshul Gupta

Figure 17. Backend design diagram.

Figure 18. Associations between users and our plugin. Figure 16. Final Design: Flag for unusual activity

We will invite the participants to our labs user-study space, which will be equipped with a simple desktop computer. A browser will be open and active, and KidGab will be loaded. This version of KidGab will include mock communications resemblant of real conversations between children. We will give the participants a username and password but no further instructions. We will ask participants to explore the site for several minutes while we (one or more members of our research team) observe the mouse click patterns, errors, and frustrations. We will ask the participants to speak aloud as they explore so we understand the conceptions and thought processes that lead to the actions being taken. Following the free-exploration exercise, we will provide participants with a series of scenarios that describe observations of a particular student that would prompt a mentor to check up on the student. An example scenario is as follows: On the playground today, you notice that Janelle is not playing with Stephanie. Instead, Janelle is playing with a group of other girls while Stephanie sits alone on a swing. The group of girls frequently points to Stephanie, whispers, and then laughs. You know Janelle and Stephanie are best friends, so something must be wrong. We will then prompt the participants to nd the usage summary tab on Stephanies KidGab prole to see if there has been any recent activity indicating a ght between the girls. Finally, we will engage the participants in a semi-structured interview that will explore the participants opinions about the usability and functionality of the system (KidGab as a whole, 8

as well as the monitoring plugin). We will also ask a few questions regarding changes or additional functionalities that would improve the system. Based on these laboratory studies, we will make the necessary modications to our system.
In-The-Wild Study

Beginning Fall 2014 (and continuing through Spring 2017), KidGab will be deployed in at least one classroom of Hearne Elementary School, a member of Hearne Independent School District in Hearne, Texas. Teachers, parents, and students will be encouraged to log-in and communicate via KidGab at least twice per week throughout the experiments duration. Teachers and parents especially will be encouraged to check-in on their students network usage with our monitoring plugin. At the conclusion of each semester, we will ask teachers and parents to complete a survey which will ask how often the parent or teacher monitored a students usage patterns, whether or not the parent or teacher was able to detect and remedy issues regarding digital citizenship or bullying, and non-identifying details of such situations where the monitoring software was helpful. We will also inquire about situations when the monitoring software was not helpful and invite ideas for improvements to solve the described issues. This in-the-wild study is a large-scale experiment that will investigate the viability of KidGab as an intervention for good cybercitizenship, the viability of the sketch playback feature as an appropriate communication channel for young children, and, of course, the viability of the monitoring system described here.

Janelle Arita

Arita took responsibility for the front-end design and much of the front-end implementation. She iterated through mockup front-end prototypes until she and all team members were pleased with the look and interaction methods proposed. She took particular care to make sure information is served in digestible chunks and that users can easily nd and understand summary statistics. Then, she programmed the design and interactions in a combination of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Anshul Gupta and Karthik Gopavaram

Gupta and Gopavaram worked on the back-end datagathering and analysis tasks. They wrote scripts to gather students activity data at daily, weekly, and monthly intervals using WordPress PHP functions and SQL queries from the KidGab database. Their script then processed the information, analyzed it, identied any deviations from normal usage patterns for any given user, and nally stored the data and analysis in the specialized usage statistics table in the database.
Stephanie Valentine

Figure 19. System sequence for monitoring an individual students activity.

CONCLUSION

Childrens participation in age-restricted online social networking has made them more vulnerable to cyber-attacks like cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, etc. In the above-described work, we developed an intelligent activity monitoring plugin to a childrens social networking site KidGab, which helps parents and teachers monitor kids activity. Our system collects statistics related to kids network usage activity and presents the statistics to parents/teachers for further action. This system also ags a childs prole based on heuristics applied to extracted statistics. Our system is able to ag unusual behaviors of children and presented statistics for each child via the UI created for activity monitoring.
FUTURE WORK

Valentine served as the intermediary between the back-end and the front-end teams. She wrote the foundation of the plugin, as well as the functionality that serves the information gathered by Gupta and Gopavaram to the design created by Arita. Valentine was also be responsible for setting up the hourly cron job used to collect usage data. She also wrote the scripts that created the graphs and charts created from that usage data. Stephanie was charged with conguring the server (http://kidgab.net/iui) and keeping the codebase it served up to date. As an expert in WordPress, BuddyPress, and KidGab, she also served as a consultant to her team members whenever they came into trouble. Valentine was elected as the group leader.
REFERENCES

1. Buddypress: Communities, the wordpress way. http://www.buddypress.org. 2. Facebook. http://www.facebook.com. 3. Google+. http://plus.google.com. 4. Instagram. http://www.instagram.com. 5. Moodle. http://www.moodle.com. 6. Myspace. http://www.myspace.com. 7. Socialengine. http://www.socialengine.com. 8. Twitter. http://www.twitter.com. 9. Wordpress blog tool, publishing platform, and cms. http://www.wordpress.org. 10. Parents Aware of and Involved with Childrens Social Networking Activities But Many Allow Their Children to Have Accounts Well Before They Meet Minimum Age Requirements. Tech. rep., Microsoft Corporation, 2010. 9

Our work on childrens activity monitoring has given an initial set up for building a more sophisticated activity monitoring system. Our next goal is to extend this work by performing sentiment analysis over the posts from children. Also, topic modelling over the posts from children in a specic group, such as a single classroom, can give us insights about trending topics of discussion. From the UI design perspective, a global monitoring interface (to show statistics of more than one student at a time) can increase ease-of-access to teachers, who have many students to supervise. We can also improve our agging algorithm by exploring some unsupervised algorithms based on content of posts .
FINAL DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITIES

11. eSchoolNews. U.S. school district monitors kids social media. http://www.eschoolnews.com/2013/09/20/ district-monitor-use-126/, Sept. 2013. 12. Jin, X., Wang, C., Luo, J., Yu, X., and Han, J. Likeminer: a system for mining the power of like in social media networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM

SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, KDD 11, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2011), 753756. 13. Winn, M. R. Promote digital citizenship through school-based social networking. Learning and Leading Magazine (December 2011/January 2012), 1013.

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