Introducing Bark for Schools Advanced, featuring new Canva monitoring and expanded visibility into student activity

Monitor Activity, Not Platforms

A Google Doc becomes a group chat. A shared presentation becomes a place for bullying. And an app designed for classroom creativity? Students find ways to use it that educators never anticipated.

Sound familiar?

Students are constantly finding new ways to communicate, collaborate, and sometimes engage in risky behavior online within the very tools schools have approved for learning.

That’s why it helps to look beyond which platforms students are using to what they’re actually doing within them.

Introducing Bark for Schools Advanced

We’re excited to introduce Bark for Schools Advanced, our newest monitoring tier, designed to help schools keep pace with how students create, communicate, and interact online.

The biggest news? Bark is bringing monitoring to Canva, giving schools visibility into potential safety concerns within one of the creative tools students use for schoolwork. We’re also expanding monitoring in Google Slides and Google Sheets to include images and video content, building on existing text monitoring.

Because what students communicate through images can be just as important as what they write.

Canva Monitoring: A First For School Safety

Canva has become a go-to creative tool in classrooms, and students use it for far more than assignments. With Advanced, Bark now monitors student Canva activity for potential safety concerns. 

As students create, edit, or view designs in Canva through supported school-managed browsers, Bark’s AI analyzes the content displayed, including:

• Presentations, documents, and whiteboards
• Social media posts and other multi-page designs
• Images students add to their designs, including any text in those images
• Comments on designs

That includes new designs and existing designs students revisit. Everything captured runs through the same AI that powers the rest of Bark for Schools, and if something concerning turns up, your assigned reviewers get an alert.

More Than Monitoring — A Clearer Picture of Student Well-Being

Schools need meaningful insights into student behavior, not more noise.

Bark’s advanced AI analyzes context, slang, emojis, tone, and patterns of language to identify potential concerns across behavioral categories, including bullying, violence, self-harm, and more.

And our technology is backed by tools that help schools understand and act on what they’re seeing:

• Human review and 24/7 emergency escalation for severe concerns, combining AI-powered detection with U.S.-based human support.
• Urgent text alert support to help teams respond quickly when time matters.
• Bark AI Assistant to help teams better understand concerning activity.
• Custom alerts and reporting to help schools recognize trends and coordinate responses.

Together, these capabilities help schools spot potential warning signs earlier, understand emerging behavioral trends, and take a more proactive approach to student safety.

Of course, identifying a concern is only the first step. What matters is getting that information to the people who can help.

Schools can customize alert routing by organizational unit or group, direct concerns to the appropriate reviewers, and establish different workflows during and after school hours. The Parent Portal also helps bring families into the response through privacy-conscious, PII-redacted alerts.

Whether it’s IT, counselors, administrators, teachers, or other student support staff, Bark helps the right people see the right signals and take action sooner.

Student Activity Will Keep Evolving, and So Will Bark.

Students will keep finding new ways to create and connect. That’s not going to change. What schools can change is how quickly they recognize potential concerns and how effectively their teams respond.

That’s what Bark is here for. We follow the activity, not just the platform, and keep expanding our monitoring capabilities as student behavior evolves.

Want to go deeper? Watch our webinar on emerging student trends, including a live look at Bark for Schools. 

Learn more about Bark for Schools Monitoring options for your school