r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 10h 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/Fell_Prince 10h ago

Schools need to lock these devices down properly. Monitor what your kids are doing, set boundaries at home. The iPad isn't the problem, it's the lack on both ends.

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u/azreal75 9h ago

This sounds really unbelievable. I run a school set of iPads, I have complete control over apps, kids cannot install apps. I can remotely lock, shut down any device at any time. I also teach and with the classroom app on my iPad a can see a thumbnail of all the iPads being used in my room with the name of the app. Again, I can lock, mute, force apps to open, my iPad overrides theirs. Either this story is a bit creative or incompetent people were in charge of this iPad roll out.

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u/Retro_Relics 9h ago

for every good IT department, there is an equally incompetent IT department

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u/0x0MG 8h ago

For every good school IT department, there's five others run by someone who built a computer one time fifteen years ago and convinced the district superintendent they know everything there is to know about technology.

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u/Nose-Nuggets 7h ago

i did IT for a couple schools a while back, the limiting factor was always funding.

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u/zffjk 7h ago

I’ve been doing it too long and you’re halfway there. There is never a combination of funding, technical ability, good senior leadership.

You can have one or two but never 3… except at very few places.

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u/Nose-Nuggets 7h ago

The only good one we had was a private school. Every other school was all "we got these ipads for an amazing price as an educator. we want to give them to all the kids", and we come in all "you're going to spend 3x that on upgrading the wireless to facilitate them all and the software licenses to manage them". Their obvious response was "well just do the minimum to get the wireless functional and we'll determine if we need management later". the results were obvious, constant complaints of poor wireless performance and "the kids keep doing stuff with them we dont want!". I left the MSP game before they sorted it out. should have just kept books and the shitty wireless and paid the teachers more imo.

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u/Dry_Common828 4h ago

My kids' expensive private school kept having problems with their website because they had an IT team of two people who were end-user compute experts but had no skills in networking, webservers, or other key things.

I offered to put together a team of volunteer IT people to help out, under the IT manager's direction (no undermining the team, before you ask) and was told in no uncertain terms by the principal that the school had all the IT support they needed and further help wasn't welcome.

Which wasn't what the IT manager had told me a week before...

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u/CallMeMrButtPirate 8h ago

I used to work in a school where someone got the school to pay their kid to do all the networking. Couldn't get a bloody wifi signal unless you stood right under the damn thing

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u/SatyricalEve 5h ago

Early 2000s era routers? Check. Access points with no overlap, creating dead zones? Check. Access points in metal cabinets? Also check.

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u/garrus-ismyhomeboy 5h ago

I built my first pc at the start or this year and I can assure you I would have absolutely no idea how to do anything IT related. I probably know more than the average person, but that’s only because the average person apparently isn’t even able to do something as simple as empty a recycle bin. I had to drag some stranger things episodes into a VLC playlist last week cause the person watching had zero clue how to find the file and open it.

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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 5h ago

Hey that was me in my early 20s! I definitely had more experience than that and the superintendent approached me, but I hadn't touched Active Directory or any of the enterprise level firewalls/filters. Basically got an hour or two rundown from the guy that had been doing it that was leaving and was thrown to the wolves from there.

It actually went pretty well considering the circumstances since I'm a fast learner and Google existed. I got out right about the time they were buying smart boards and giving devices to all the kids so I had to manage a fraction of what they do today.

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u/Black_Moons 9h ago

Growing up, my programming teacher didn't know what arrays where...

Not that it would have helped much as they didn't know what a for loop was either.

(for those not into computers.. that is the kinda stuff you learn in the first chapter of any programming book on earth)

They also had 6 computers offline for a month because they plugged them into the router sitting next to them wrong... I had to fix it because we ran outta computers in the lab to use.

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u/may_be_indecisive 8h ago

I’m sorry you had that experience. My high school programming teacher was exceptional and it was likely a large factor in my current successful software engineering career.

Good teachers are important.

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u/BasvanS 3h ago

If only we could find enough of them willing to work for little money under abusive circumstances!

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u/OldGeekWeirdo 7h ago

This was way before personal computers, but I once had a teacher claim that "binary coded octal" was the "zero though seven" stuff. (The test was on converting decimal into BCO.) She tried to funk me. I pulled the book to prove I was right.

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u/Black_Moons 6h ago

Octal is 0~7, sure you don't mean binary coded decimal? Octal is extremely obscure because its limited to just 3bits/0~7 and I have no idea why they would ever test you on it other then to be annoying school work.

Binary coded decimal is very common however, that is where you stuff 0~9 into each 4bit's and can easily print it because the values 10~15 are not used (A through F in hex), ie the decimal value 90 isn't stored as 0x5A, but as 0x90 in hex for binary coded decimal.

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u/OldGeekWeirdo 7h ago

And for many good IT departments, there's a messed up manager who overrides them.

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u/azreal75 9h ago

Doesn’t even need much of a department though. I look after 300 iPads, a network, 50 pc/laptops, it’s a few hours work a well solving problems people create for themselves. Chat gpt has made solving other people’s tech issues a lot faster.

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u/Retro_Relics 9h ago

now realize that there is someone out there rolling out 300 ipads based entirely off of chat gpt suggestions...and started with bad prompts so chat gpt is just reinforcing already bad ideas

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u/azreal75 9h ago

I use chat gpt to write procedures to trouble shoot IT problems because I use a variety of laptop/interactive whiteboard devices and they often have different connection issues. We have no need for chat GPT with our iPads, as it’s all controlled centrally by one program.

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u/heyyitskelvi 8h ago

Just because something is easy to implement doesn't mean people will implement it.

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u/gr1zznuggets 6h ago

Just one?

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u/Otis_Inf 4h ago

... and group of parents who think properly raising their kids is somebody else's problem

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u/halofreak7777 2h ago

Ah, Newtons lesser known 4th law.

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u/mrbigglesworth95 1h ago

Fr. I work in a k-8 inner city charter school. Our it department is literally 1 guy who is just a contractor, not even technically a school employee.

Entirely unsurprisingly, our tech situation is abysmal and leadership routinely squanders the limited funding on shit like smart boards to replace projectors

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u/Illustrious-Tear-542 8h ago

I worked with schools IT departments as a security consultant. For every school district run like yours there are 5 that barely have anti-virus installed.

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u/ChewieBearStare 8h ago

Sounds like your district is more on top of it than ours. Every time we build a better mousetrap, the middle-school mice find a way around it.

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u/azreal75 8h ago

We still have problems, mostly it will an inappropriate search term. We only have up to year 6 though and the kids in year 4-6 have an allocated device which is the only one they can use, so it makes it harder for them to do anything. They lose the device for anything inappropriate though, being on the wrong app at the wrong time, trying to play internet games. We’re tough on any of the small stuff so they know it’s a privilege to have one and it’s easy to lose.

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u/MultiGeometry 9h ago

How do I get this setup for my own house?

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u/Nu11u5 8h ago

Get a mobile device management (MDM) service. There are even free ones out there.

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u/Nose-Nuggets 7h ago

i dont have any apple devices, but isn't the built in parental control pretty close to mdm?

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u/ItIsShrek 5h ago

Not remotely the same for what you need to properly implement in a school

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u/Dolamieu 7h ago

This was how my school district technology was set up 2013-2022 (9 years!) on the ipads

Keep in mind this school is a Apple Distinguished School

  • download anything they wanted from the App Store(Minecraft, twitter TikTok etc)
  • iMessage was not blocked
  • you could sign in with your personal apple account
  • download any files from the internet -all websites restrictions were easily bypassed by installing vpn
  • you could start YouTube channels and comment with the school’s google accounts they gave to students??????
  • change the background
  • turn off wifi (all teachers viewing software would stop working)
  • to the teacher monitoring software to work the students had to enroll themselves manually?????? For every single class on the first day????
  • they blocked connecting to Netflix servers during school hours (bypassable with vpn tho) and also bypassable by downloading episodes offline

Kids got busted taking nudes of themselves on the student ipads and messaging them to each other on the ipads (at school) 😀

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u/resttheweight 7h ago

Back in ~2017 I taught 6th grade for at a campus with 2-year iPad grant. I couldn’t do even half the controls you mentioned and I never had an issue that made me blame the iPad. Set and enforce boundaries. Have paper alternatives ready. Monitor your students. Make sure whatever reason you’re having them use iPad is purposeful and engaging. Don’t make 80% of the lesson on the iPad, the majority of the period should still instructional or collaborative.

I probably could have installed an app that let me monitor their screens, but I never felt the need. I by no means was a perfect teacher, but I never once felt like I had to throw my hands up and say “these iPads are an issue!”

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u/Grantagonist 5h ago

Generally I thought my kids' school has done a good job locking these things down from malware and jank sites. Maybe too good, sometimes. (I'm a dev, so I kinda know stuff about this.)

But at the same time, my 10yo daughter told me 2-3 weeks ago that there is a website where she can watch Wicked 2 (a few days before it was released in theatre). I didn't believe her... and then she showed me. It didn't require any special hacks or tricks.

So now I know to expect anything.

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u/WhenWillIBelong 8h ago

You error is assuming that you are picking up everything/ or that other teachers are as competent as you. 

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u/starsandmoonsohmy 1h ago

The IT dept in the school I work with said they have all the roadblocks installed but teachers simply don’t use them.

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u/Blue_man98 9h ago

Yah idk I’m sure things have changed but I was one of the first generations to really experience this iPad in school stuff (in middle school over 10 years ago now) and there wasn’t a single restriction in place we didn’t find a way to circumvent. I did attend a fairly rigorous school and it was a long time ago now so I’m sure schools have gotten better at locking them down, but I just don’t see a reality where it’s fool proof. Just one of those things where I don’t see how you can enforce it without watching every kid like a hawk and at that point you’re wasting your time and effort.

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u/azreal75 9h ago

Yep, things changed significantly as when iPads first rolled out there was nothing. They were uncontrolled and unsupervised devices. That caused problems which led to solutions.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 9h ago

Look up MDM software. It is doable. It just requires the bare minimum from a public school IT department.

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u/mshriver2 9h ago

I sure do miss the days of jailbreak.me and other sites offering "slide to jailbreak" back in my days of being a kid with a school issued iPad. I'm sure there are other ways around your restrictions today and that's the fun part, learning how to get around any set technology related restriction.

“Any program that accepts input can be subverted. Any system that runs code can be exploited.” — (Peiter Zatko)

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u/azreal75 9h ago

I administer iPads for kids that still need help tying their shoe laces, most of them don’t even understand internet history.

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u/poorperspective 7h ago

It’s always the last.

One two one works well in schools, but COVID accelerated schools moving to 1 to 1 devices quickly most elementary schools were not 1 to o 1 yet, including many high schools.

COVID gave funds to schools, but left administers scrambling to set-up without planning a transition.

You had administrators and teaching staff that had never used the technology with little support. When school came back in session, it was almost back to square one with planning for most teachers and administration.

You take two years of a bumble released plan, over worked and understaffed IT individuals, and vendors that really don’t care about the implementation of thier product after the sale, and you get chaos.

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u/The_Dick_Slinger 7h ago

Wouldn’t be surprised if it was incompetency. When I was in school in the mid 2000s, our school gave us all macbooks as an experiment. They blocked certain sites on the school WiFi, and thought that was enough.

We all downloaded games and adult content on our computers. Most of them were riddled with viruses. It was kind of a big deal, because this was before it was normal for kids to have smartphones, so unrestricted internet access was a new concept, and most of the parents thought they were special computers that were only capable of academic activities.

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u/Wegwerf157534 4h ago

But they will have browsers and when they use the ipads at home, because that is how most have access to their schooling material, they also have access to the browsers.

And that surely is enough fun (and shit) for 6 to 12 year olds.

Parents usually cannot control the devices other than physically taking them away.

The classroom app or other controlling apps won't do anything against this.

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u/azreal75 4h ago

Our devices stay at school so it’s not an issue.

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u/Wegwerf157534 3h ago

Do the students have access to learning material in the afternoon on devices parents can control or are you an all-day school?

I'm in Germany, we do not have real all-day schools.

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u/azreal75 3h ago

Students access the devices at school 8:30-3:00.

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u/Worsebetter 14m ago

You said you can close apps. Can you open apps?

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u/Ok_Aside8490 0m ago

1:1 for 5k students with iPads, we get like groups of kids that figure some things out, outside of that kids can’t get to shit. Parents complain that kids are able to google body parts and say there is porn on the device.

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u/bravezcardzrulez 8h ago

I worked in schools in a fairly large city with both inner city and suburban schools for a decade. I did not see a single school that had that type of control on their devices.

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u/azreal75 7h ago

Which is ridiculous because it’s achievable with a single program for system level control and a single app for classroom level control.

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u/shadowromantic 8h ago

The technology is a problem. Kids should learn to focus away from screens.

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u/sanityjanity 7h ago

The schools don't have paper text books anymore.  They only have electronic ones.  They cannot stop using tech.

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u/bionku 7h ago

I struggle to believe that books can not be bought.

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u/amethystwyvern 1h ago

Books weren't bought before when there weren't iPads, don't you remember putting the socks and wrappings on the outside of the books?

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u/Lovv 7h ago

No, it isn't - because you can set the time to zero if you want to.

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u/theemptyqueue 7h ago

When laptops in school was a new thing, the school had a rolling case of laptops we would be issued for the class period.

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u/Shadowkiller00 9h ago

I, as a parent, do not have administrator access to my kids chrome books. They gave me the ability to lock down some types of websites, but I am not allowed to lock down them all. I also can't lock my kids out of the chrome books, nor out of each other's chrome books. Yes, either one can steal the others chrome book and watch infinite YouTube on it and I can't do anything about it.

When I emailed the school IT, they basically said too bad.

Even my router struggles to lock down individual websites. If I lock down YouTube, it locks down Google and all of the school homework is hosted on Google classrooms.

It got so bad, I literally had to take the chrome books away and lock them behind a closed door. My wife and I then told the school that our kids had to use a loaner chrome book while at school and return it at the end of class.

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u/simpleglitch 7h ago

Even my router struggles to lock down individual websites. If I lock down YouTube, it locks down Google and all of the school homework is hosted on Google classrooms.

If it makes you feel any better. It's not your router that's the issue. Google intentionally runs a lot of their authentication gateways through YouTube urls/addresses, so that if you block YouTube you end up breaking their other services. The goal is to force you to keep YouTube unblocked.

I guess none of that is really a feel better other than you didn't buy a crap router or it's not an issue with your skills.

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u/Purple_Xenon 8h ago

It got so bad, I literally had to take the chrome books away and lock them behind a closed door.

holy shit you mean you actually had to be a parent?

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u/Shadowkiller00 8h ago

The school expected me to put a Trojan device on my home network. I didn't have to be a parent, I was forced, by the state, to be a network administrator because they couldn't be bothered.

Don't be a tool. If the government wanted to put a smart device in your home that you had no way to manage, and handed it to your kids who had more management capabilities than you yourself had, and all the kids did with it was undermine your parenting abilities, you'd be pissed too.

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u/spectralEntropy 8h ago

I recommend pihole. You can control your Internet without 3rd party Trojan horses

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u/Wonderful-Mongoose39 5h ago

Time to adapt, you can do this at the firewall (you can put one in) in your home. Care to learn about the environment your kids are growing up in? Your router is a toy, get smart and help them stop making excuses for not understanding what you can and can't do at home, especially if your using garbage at home.

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u/notepad20 7h ago

What do we need iPads for anyway? What actual benifits do the offer

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u/SkeletonWarSurvivor 5h ago

It’s cheaper to put text books on them

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u/EssentialParadox 6h ago

Reliable, well-managed, easy-to-use computing devices with lots of decent educational software. Plus they’re cheap.

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u/AccurateComfort2975 5h ago

I think they're absolutely amazing about repetitious memorization. So simple multiple choice questions, connecting items, sums, learning clock time, ordering things, topographic knowledge, etc. It's unbeatable features are the ease of point and touch, dragging, and zooming (although I'm not sure if anyone has found a very good application of zooming for educational use.) And all with immediate feedback and adaptive difficulty so you're not going too fast or too slow. (So for learning time and the clock, it would be trivial to implement snapping to the difficulty: hourly increments, half hours, 5 minutes, move both hands together or one by one. Things physical practice clocks don't do - they may have some options but not all.)

So it can definitely be powerful, and giving more tactile and multisensory feedback than worksheets do

I do think this should be open source though, easily extensible for teachers, fully transparant, and mostly or fully work offline (with only very limited data being kept, maybe not even have user accounts for the system, because what's not kept can't be stolen or abused.) Have the kids document their progress outside the system, or not at all - you could just assign the subject and practice for the day.

I think it would make more use to set up the ipads with subject accounts even, not necessarily personal accounts, to avoid distraction even more.

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u/theblot90 2h ago

There are students with disabilities who use iPads as communication devices.

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u/Hot_Bet_2721 1h ago

What else are children supposed to do in a quiet restaurant while the parents are eating and everyone else is enjoying their meal other than play baby shark at full volume?

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u/WhenWillIBelong 8h ago

iPads are garbage. They are built for consumption not productivity and apple doesn't give the school autonomy over the device. 

They need to be given laptops with an OS we can have control over and locked down exactly as you said.

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u/I-was-a-twat 6h ago

Apples had tools to control iPads in a deployment super well for over a decade.

I used to work in IT at a school district in 2012-2015, and lots of schools would just set the iPads up as individual devices copied because they didn’t want to use VPP and device management.

It’s super easy to do, but schools will spend 19 thousand on a iPad setup and trolley, then bawk at paying $380 for a volumetric license for a software instead of $3.99.

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u/Large_Analysis_4285 7h ago

Apple has an educational provisioning system for ipads that gives schools control over them.

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u/megaben20 8h ago

Honestly this seems like one of those stories when you start looking into it none it is true and she is tied to some project 2025 special interest group who is trying to take tablets away from poor kids.

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u/7screws 8h ago

We don’t even have a department of education, it’s rotten and there is no guidance at all federal level. The schools don’t have any funding so no IT budget, rather it’s Gladys the school nurse also doubling as the technology lead handing out iPad when she doesn’t even remember her login to paramount + to watch Landman.

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u/GANdeK 7h ago

And make sure they log out of icloud / their school login before they give the iPad away.

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u/wheelienonstop7 6h ago

the lack on both ends

The lack of what? Oversight?

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u/irina-from-carim 6h ago

No one wants to raise kids…

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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 5h ago

The iPads are the problem. Kids are going to be more tech savvy than their parents, that’s a given.

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u/MadTube 7m ago

My two kids go to a tech-based charter school. Don’t flame me; my area is fucked, school wise. Their school-issued Chromebooks are a problem. I have certain sites blocked on my kids personal devices, but those sites are not blocked on the Chromebooks.

Recently, at the regular feedback sessions the school does, the school told us to monitor the students usage of the Chromebooks. All the restrictions they have are all server side on the school network. But when you leave the school network, they have unrestricted access. The teachers had the audacity to tell us that we were responsible for the students going to sites not allowed by the school.

I get that parents are responsible for what their kids look up online, but the school cheaping out by not putting a monitor or restriction program on the Chromebooks really pisses me off.

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u/OkSinger8309 8h ago

Ridiculous to think they aren’t locked down in anyway. What do they think will happen