what did she think was going to happen when they opted to eliminate textbooks in favor of tablets?
Problem is, as soon as those tablets can access the internet, they are going to be used in ways the school doesn’t intend. And since most of the kids are so much more tech savvy than the adults issuing the tablets, I don’t know how you avoid it. The L.A. school district tried to issue “crippled” iPads and they were “uncrippled” very quickly.
You raise a great point about "learning the technology", an important part of today's tech world. As I see it, my son was learning about the capabilities of that tablet, though he should not have playing games in class.
Yep. And so the school has reasonable rules that any child could easily understand and follow “Don’t put unauthorized things on the official school tablets”
And then a kid does it anyway, because he doesn’t know how to follow rules, or doesn’t think rules apply, or because everybody does it.
In this case, at least, the parent was willing to take the appropriate action of disciplining the child for breaking a reasonable rule.
Although we don’t need to then berate a teacher for this, or blame it on “getting rid of textbooks”. We need to give kids a chance to easily break rules that are easily followed, so we can then punish the ones that break the rules, so they learn discipline.
There are probably really good uses for the tablets that are disabled because we can’t trust parents to teach their kids to follow rules, can’t trust kids to follow rules, can’t trust parents to care that their kids aren’t following rules, and so we lock the things down for everybody to protect us from the few that can’t follow simple rules.
The technology already exists to create white and black lists for websites and apps to be blocked or filtered. It certainly is within the realm of security technology to record the usage and web traffic little johnny and Jenny visit. What hasn’t been invented is a strong enough replacement backbone for most public school administrators to implement this. Or big enough testicular implants to stand up to these ridiculous and entitlement-hungry parents.