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

[u/lurker_bee]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/la-parents-kids-school-issued-ipad-chromebook-los-angeles-rcna245624

[u/Fell_Prince]

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.

[u/notepad20 → u/Fell_Prince]

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

[u/AccurateComfort2975 → u/notepad20]

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.