Guide’s Handbook – Hero Shield

Understanding Your Role as a Guide

The Hero Shield is designed to support a balanced approach to digital safety:

• Protection: Filter inappropriate content that is not suitable for your Hero.
• Guidance: Use the Hero Choice feature to teach decision-making.
• Monitoring: Review choices and help your Hero reflect on their digital decisions.

Getting Started

1. Setting the Guide Password

The Guide Password protects the extension settings from unauthorized changes:

• Set a secure password that you can remember but your Hero cannot easily guess
• Licensed users can reset their password to the default found in their purchase email or customer dashboard
• Free trial users can reset by reinstalling the extension (this will clear all settings)

2. License Activation

Hero Shield offers both free trial and licensed versions:

• Free Trial: 14-day trial with full functionality
• Licensed Version: Enter your license key and device name to activate
• Purchase licenses at actonrexburg.org/heroshield

License Activation Across Multiple Devices

Understanding how your license works across different devices:

• Settings Sync: Your filter preferences, approved sites, blocked sites, and license key automatically sync across all Chrome devices where you’re signed in with the same Google account
• Manual Activation Required: You must manually activate your license on each new device, even though your settings sync
• Device Limits: Each license plan has different activation limits depending on your subscription level
• Device Names: Choose descriptive names like “Home Laptop”, “Work Desktop”, or “Teen’s Chromebook” to easily identify your activations. For schools: Consider using student ID numbers, grade levels, or classroom codes (e.g., “Student-12345”, “5th-Grade-Room-A”, “Chromebook-Cart-3”) to identify devices without sharing personal student information
• Different Users Need Separate Activations: If multiple people use the same computer but sign in with different Google accounts, each person needs their own license activation
• Chrome-Based Browsers Only: This extension only works in Chrome and Chrome-based browsers like Microsoft Edge (Chromium version)

3. AI Content Filtering Setup

The extension uses AI through a secure proxy server to evaluate content appropriateness:

• Choose a filter strength based on your Hero’s age and maturity:
  • High: Suitable for ages 7-10 (strict filtering)
  • Medium: Suitable for ages 11-13 (balanced approach)
  • Low: Suitable for ages 14+ (minimal filtering)
• When uncertain about content safety:
  • The High filter strength will lean toward blocking content
  • The Low filter strength will lean toward allowing content
• Content evaluations are cached locally for 24 hours to improve performance

4. Configure Filter Categories

Select which types of content should be filtered:

• Violence: Blocks content with fighting, weapons, or other violent themes
• Sexual Content: Blocks content featuring underwear, swimsuit content, suggestive imagery, and explicit material
• Social Media: Limits access to social networking sites (Note: YouTube is treated as a video platform, not social media)
• Distractions: Blocks games, entertainment sites, and non-academic distractions that may divert focus from learning

5. Enable Hero Choice Mode

This feature presents your Hero with a choice when attempting to access filtered content (except sexual content, which is always blocked):

• Instead of automatically blocking distractions, violence, and social media, it asks if the site is needed for their Hero’s Journey
• Logs their choices for later review and discussion
• Builds decision-making skills and responsibility
• Provides accountability without being overly restrictive

Understanding the Priority System

When managing approved and blocked sites:

• Blocked sites always override approved sites – If a site appears in both lists, it will be blocked
• You can approve entire domains while blocking specific URLs within those domains
• The extension will warn you when adding a site that creates a conflict

Using the Hero Choice Log

The Hero Choice Log is a powerful tool for meaningful conversations about digital choices:

• Review sites your Hero has chosen to visit
• Use this as an opportunity to discuss their choices rather than as a “gotcha” moment
• Ask questions like:
  • “How did this site help your learning journey?”
  • “Was this a good use of your time? Why or why not?”
  • “What did you learn from this site?”
• Block sites that are consistently problematic

Advanced Features

Customizing AI Prompts

You can fine-tune how the AI evaluates content by customizing prompts:

• Use the “Customize AI Prompts” option to add specific instructions
• Different prompts for different content types: websites, YouTube videos, YouTube searches, and Google searches
• To block specific content, use phrases like “block sites that contain…”
• To allow specific content, use phrases like “allow sites that contain…”
• The AI will interpret “block X” as unsafe and “allow X” as safe

YouTube Content Analysis

The extension has enhanced YouTube filtering capabilities:

• Extracts video titles, channel names, and descriptions for accurate filtering
• Handles YouTube’s dynamic content loading properly
• Uses YouTube’s oEmbed API as a fallback for content extraction
• Treats YouTube as a video platform, not social media, for filtering purposes

Temporary Disable Feature

You can temporarily disable the filter when needed:

• Set a specific time duration (minutes and hours)
• Filter automatically re-enables after the set time
• Option to disable without automatic re-enabling
• Useful for supervised browsing or troubleshooting

Viewing AI Filter Details (Advanced)

For troubleshooting or understanding how the AI makes filtering decisions:

• Right-click on the Hero Shield extension icon and select “Inspect popup”
• Or go to Chrome menu → Extensions → Manage Extensions → Hero Shield → Details → Inspect views: “background page”
• In the DevTools Console, you can see detailed logs of AI requests and responses
• This shows the exact prompts sent to the AI and the reasoning behind filtering decisions
• Useful for understanding why specific content was blocked or allowed

Managing Approved and Blocked Sites

You can customize which sites are always approved or blocked:

• Add educational sites to the approved list
• Add problematic sites or time-wasting sites to the blocked list
• For search engines, you can block specific search queries by adding them directly

Important Limitations & Best Practices

Be aware of these limitations and recommendations:

• No filter is 100% accurate – AI may occasionally misclassify content
• Chrome browser only – Does not work in other browsers or apps
• Requires internet connection – AI evaluation needs network access
• Content evaluation timing – Some content may briefly appear before being filtered
• Active guidance essential – Technology works best with ongoing conversations about digital citizenship
• Regular review recommended – Check Hero Choice logs and adjust settings as needed