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Ours have had school ipads or macbooks since Kindergarten(!) and agreed, it's awful. They should drop the tech until high school. It's not helping anything and

Ours have had school ipads or macbooks since Kindergarten(!) and agreed, it's awful. They should drop the tech until high school. It's not helping anything and is a huge distraction. All the online homework shit's so very much worse than when they just had workbooks full of tear-out sheets, for the lower grades. You can probably buy a hundred or more of those books for a reasonable subject-curriculum for a year, bulk, for the cost of one low-end iPad. Just go back to that stuff. It was fine. This isn't better. Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.

xwolfi 4y ago
You can with a smart router like the Synology RT2600: it can do mac-adress level site firewalls so say ban youtube between such and such for all your kids' devices (it can assign a persona to a bunch of mac addresses).
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Yeah, I know I can get more hardware to fix it (or set up a BSD router again like I did way back in '04 or whenever) but it sucks that I already have a good system that works perfectly for my needs and required no tech horse-shit on my part (I'm just... so over doing that stuff when someone's not paying me to) and the schools are punching holes in it. Got this great smoothly-running machine here, and they're tossing a wrench in the works. I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
- pixl97 4y ago
  This could possibly end up problematic as I've seen videos embedded in kids homework. Not sure if that was just something that particular teacher did or what.
heavyset_go 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft all have education programs where they offer school districts free or discounted hardware and services. Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
deleted 4y ago
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xwolfi 4y ago

You can with a smart router like the Synology RT2600: it can do mac-adress level site firewalls so say ban youtube between such and such for all your kids' devices (it can assign a persona to a bunch of mac addresses).

yamtaddle 4y ago
Yeah, I know I can get more hardware to fix it (or set up a BSD router again like I did way back in '04 or whenever) but it sucks that I already have a good system that works perfectly for my needs and required no tech horse-shit on my part (I'm just... so over doing that stuff when someone's not paying me to) and the schools are punching holes in it. Got this great smoothly-running machine here, and they're tossing a wrench in the works. I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
pixl97 4y ago
This could possibly end up problematic as I've seen videos embedded in kids homework. Not sure if that was just something that particular teacher did or what.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I'm pretty sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft all have education programs where they offer school districts free or discounted hardware and services. Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.

deleted 4y ago

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