My daughter's school gives all the kids ipads and she got a new one this year. The IT guy gave it to her before locking it down so she installed all the dumb apps she wanted on it before handing it back over. The point, aside from how proud I am of my daughter, is that kids are going to find a way to get what they want. This is an arms race. It'll be interesting to watch.
I've never heard a good, convincing explanation as to why on earth children need iPads for any reason. Are the schools just not doing their jobs, and letting the iPads "teach" the children rather than a person doing it?
My backpack in primary school times was about 3kgs on worst days - school lockers aren't a thing here. We carried our books, notebooks, exercises, PE suit, boots and lunch day after day; home to school and back again - a scoliosis story /s. Secondary school times were more chill - while it was mandatory to have all of that stuff, teachers were turning blind eyes.
So slowly seeing how tablets or laptops are replacing all that paper I'm envy those kids. But at the same time I see the dangers, how kids are addicted to the mobiles and the Internet; school should set such devices to be tools and not potential form of entertainment as much it's only possible.
That's a really good point. My kids have tablets but they barely carry books. They could probably get 90% of the same stuff done if they were given an eReader instead of a tablet. It would have several benefits now I think about it.
* frame rate sucks too much for tik-tok to be any good
* easier on the eyes
* useless for doing homework on, so the kids go back to paper where they have to show their work anyway.
I dunno this might be the way. Instead of artificially limiting platforms, let the platform's natural limitations do the work.
I totally agree. Many assignments are on the ipad, and they come via shitty sass products that regularly crash, taking their homework with them. Additionally for stuff like math you need to show your work, which is impossible for higher level math so the kids have to turn in a paper version along with the ipad assignment.
A number of years ago when my daughter was in the second grade the school expected them to turn in homework via this crappy power point knock-off app that would constantly crash.
I had her eventually just take screen shots and send them to the printer. From there? She would fill in her answers, take a picture of the work, and then drop the image into the power point knockoff.
We got a note from the Principal about how "printing" was not supported.
Local morons gave ours an ipad with its own data plan, free access to youtube, and screentime disabled. I had zero control but to physically take it. Bet you can’t wait to find out what happened next!
Many months later we got a stern letter that yt had to be blocked because students weren’t using it for assignments. Who could have predicted such a thing? :-P
It all started during covid too so I had very limited ability to say no.
I think that's two separate battles which are part of the same topic.
Battle #1 is combining the complexity and abundance of electronic devices with the time, dedication, and cleverness of kids requires (literally) writing a bug free operating system & application ecosystem as well as nearly every school employee having a completely accurate understanding of how to manage them. The goal here is never to get to 100% compliance but to add friction to noncompliance so it's easier for workers to do their job and get through the day.
Battle #2 (the part these kinds of bans focus on) is on setting expectations for when electronic devices are allowed at all. Whether or not students always comply isn't even the goal of this battle, it's all about making the problem clear and swift to deal with: "I saw your phone during school hours so you're caught and it's confiscated" isn't about preventing kids from being sneaky, it's about making the enforcement easy.
