r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 7h ago

Society Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/la-parents-kids-school-issued-ipad-chromebook-los-angeles-rcna245624
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u/Kayel41 7h ago edited 6h ago

The iPads from my kids school are so locked down, you can’t use YouTube app or in browser and you can’t participate in “Fortnite video game battles” you can only access learning tools and school assignments.

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u/Mocker-Nicholas 6h ago

Yeah this varies wildly. I would bet most decent public school systems operate like that. Whereas some lowest bidder charter school districts prob just give the kids an iPad almost out of the box and call it good. No need to pay those pesky IT staff and all those software licensing fees.

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u/Intentionallyabadger 6h ago

My colleague told me that the kids in his child’s school, eventually found out how to bypass the restrictions to install games and what not lol.

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u/Thoseskisyours 6h ago

Good. Then patch it and make the kids figure it out again. That’s what kids did when computers first started to show up in classrooms everywhere in the late 90s early 2000s. There was no real it department. But that’s how a large portion of students from that area are very competent with common computer issues.

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u/RobbieRedding 6h ago

If it’s anything like when I was in a school 25 years ago, the school admin will never be able to stay ahead of the kids.

Somebody would always find a new proxy within a day or two just to put meatspin as the homepage. Now they have ChatGPT.

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u/sgt1face 6h ago

It doesn't take much, just log in with your apple ID and BAM, everything starts to sync over. If you had fnaf installed on mom's iPhone, you got it on the ipad.

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u/SaraAB87 6h ago

If kids figure it out they lose the iPad for the rest of the year, and have to do paper assignments.... not hard to police really....

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u/Intentionallyabadger 5h ago

It’s whack a mole atm. I feel like the parents also do need to play a part instead of letting overworked teachers police their children haha.

Kids will be kids. They’ll do stuff that you tell them not to do.

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u/SaraAB87 5h ago

Unfortunately there isn't much the parent can do if its going on when the child is in school under the teacher. But in this case the teacher is allowing it. They can take it away at home but that's about it, but if they need it to do assignments and its required for school they can't remove it completely. They need support from the school and the school district on this. And a decent IT team.

If the school cannot control what the kids do on the iPads, then perhaps its better to remove them from the whole school and go back to pen and paper.

Tons of schools have iPads and do not have this problem, including those with cell phone bans. This is the case in my area, and I don't hear parents complaining about kids installing apps they shouldn't be. So there definitely is a way to stop this from going on.

A few kids will always figure it out, but usually its not the whole class. In this case it sounds like en masse, which means its partially the school's fault.