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L.A. School District Halting Home Use of Issued iPads After Students Bypass Content Restrictions

centauratlas said:
Or the title could be: "Big brother LA school district finds that kids are smarter than the geniuses who set this up".

Why would the LA School District care what the kids do on the iPads? Get a clue, the kids can surf from other devices too, and blocking it is just stupid.
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Ok - I'll put this scenario into something that might make sense to you and others.

Your company issues you a laptop. They have security measure to block copying files off you computer and visiting certain sites because they are security risks involved and/or they don't want you goofing off on their dime.

Now you figure a way around it.

Should your company care?

Yes.

The iPads here were issued by the school - they are not owned by the students. If they want to block access to apps, websites, etc - that's their right and privilege. It doesn't matter what you do on your own device. And the LA district I'm sure isn't so stupid to think they can control what happens on OTHER devices. But they can on theirs.
 
Lack of pilot testing.
Our iPads are pretty well locked down. You can remove the MDM profile from the device ( apple doesn't allow locking it ). Our MDM notifies me of the profile removal. I lock the device via the iCloud with a message to see the principal.

Students don't have access to their iTunes account passwords.

We have had one student silly enough to try and steal an iPad. I sent the sheriff. He's in jail right now awaiting two felony charges. He was a senior in high school and just turned 18.
 
Generally speaking kids are smart. Remember, they've grown up around this stuff.

I work with kids aged 11+ pretty regularly through youth groups and summer camps, and almost to a person, they tell me about how their school tried to lock down Facebook, etc. but it's really easy to defeat and all you need to do is do this and click there and change this to that and you can log in. It's virtually common knowledge.

I don't fault the kids of course. They're learning. That's what they're supposed to do. The adults just need to work harder to keep ahead of the game :D
 
litmag01 said:
Is this true?

If so, extremely poor judgement on the school district's deployment!
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Ars Technica mentioned in their article about this story that the school was using ActiveSync to just adapt the iPads into their existing Exchange infrastructure (instead of building the proper infrastructure to manage a such a large number of iPads).
 
The massive iPad distribution in Los Angeles (an effort I'm involved in myself) had a 100% chance of having growing pains. Nobody should be surprised about that.

The first major problem showed up quickly, despite iPads having been issued to a handful of schools in a first-round test. The schools that are getting them now are the second round. IT will solve this problem, run into another, solve that problem, run into another, and so on. It's hard for a large school district to be light on its feet, but that's what IT will need to be.

Learning how best to use the iPads is another challenge. District teachers are receiving instruction in use of the iPads, both in general and specifically for the subjects they teach, but they didn't get much lead time. This school year is going to be a learning experience for all concerned.

I don't worry about the potholes in the road. I want us to keep our eyes focused on where the road leads. We'll learn our lessons and look for the right ways to use this technology when and where it can benefit K-12 students. It's not magic; it takes work. What happens in the classroom day-to-day is more important than the peripheral issues about "hacking", what to do about lost iPads, whether students will need keyboards (something that's not in the budget), and whatever else we hear about in the news.
 
I see a couple of things wrong here.

1.Obviously a lot of posters don't have kids. Suggesting kids get rewards for helping the administration sounds like some pollyanna idealism. Breaking the rules is not something you take to the administration. It's something you hide from them. Bypassing school security is one that would spread virally (made up word) through the student body. If anyone remembers the old Faberge shampoo commercial (wow did I just date myself:eek:) that's how this info is usually spread.[youtube it] By the time the adminstration finds out it's usually old news.

2. LA School District - Good idea. Poor execution. Their first thought, even before curriculum, should have been security. How do you mitigate potential technological harm to the kids under your tutelage? How do you lessen the chance that the school will be held liable by a highly determined and skilled student dead set on circumventing the system? Get the security right first. Nothing is 100% safe but if you can demonstrate you've made a concerted effort to provide a safe, creative learning environment, it's less likely your efforts will be skirted by something this simple.

As I said, they're on the right track by augmenting traditional learning with new techniques. Their enthusiasm for the new techniques shouldn't blind them from one of their core tenets: protect the kids in their care. Even if they're protecting the kids from themselves.
 
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960design said:
Lack of pilot testing.
Our iPads are pretty well locked down. You can remove the MDM profile from the device ( apple doesn't allow locking it ). Our MDM notifies me of the profile removal. I lock the device via the iCloud with a message to see the principal.

Students don't have access to their iTunes account passwords.

We have had one student silly enough to try and steal an iPad. I sent the sheriff. He's in jail right now awaiting two felony charges. He was a senior in high school and just turned 18.
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How would you be notified if they did a DFU restore? The profile won't be running to tell the iPad to report anything. The iPad would appear to be off (not reporting to MDM).
 
Doctor Q said:
Learning how best to use the iPads is another challenge. District teachers are receiving instruction in use of the iPads, both in general and specifically for the subjects they teach, but they didn't get much lead time. This school year is going to be a learning experience for all concerned..
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That is the hard part. Teaching teachers to use them as part of their curriculum has so far proven nearly impossible on a large scale. Sure we have a couple of teachers loaded up with Airserver on their laptops, streaming lessons via their iPad to a projector for the class. For the most part the students are far more educated than the teachers and getting the teachers to step off of their pedestal and learn as they teach is the challenge.

Managing iPads is easy compared to the above.
 
guzhogi said:
Configurator can help. I use it at the school I work at. However, it still is not very good.

However, I think the profile is just the tip of the iceberg of the the problem. The underlying problem is no one wants to teach the kids how to be responsible. It's just easier to block unsavory sites.
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This is it right here. No desire to spend time and resources helping the students learn digital citizenship. We have similar problems at our school. Youtube, etc, is blocked but it took them almost no time to figure out if they used https:// to access those sites, they were free to do so.
 
My high school issued us laptops junior year and in addition to all the usual network blocks and password protections, they also had some form of tracking software as well as some background program that didn't allow any .exe's to run that weren't specifically approved. Within a day of having the laptops, several people I knew had already hacked the admin account and disabled the tracker. Within a week a friend of mine had written a script to suppress the .exe blocker. From there we could run proxies to bypass the network blocks and run just about any other software we wanted; it took a little longer to get TF2 working. Within two weeks, the script he had written had become nearly ubiquitous across the school. And about halfway through the semester and I turned mine into a hackintosh:)

No matter what they do, the students will find a way. Granted the iPads will probably be a bit more difficult than the crappy Dell's we had.
 
960design said:
Haha! Apparently you are smarter than me. I'll do some research on it right now.
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The only reason I found out is we have AC on a Mac Mini, provisioned some employee phones for a test and after 6 months, found out someone wiped the Mac Mini. Then when we had to make changes to the phones, we couldn't. No one had the password to remove the profiles on the phone.

Only a DFU restore worked. I don't believe a normal restore would. DFU will be when the screen is black on the phone but iTunes detects a phone in restore mode (vs. having an image on the iPhone).
 
This probably is due to liability concerns

First off, yes, this probably is due to liability concerns.

Alas, Americans do not understand how to correctly assess risk. It turns out that your school is somewhat more likely to burn down than it is to be sued by an outraged parent, and yet schools spend orders of magnitude more time and money planning how to avoid the latter than they do planning how to avoid the former.

Lawsuits aren't actually a huge problem in the US. (Yes, yes, I know you think they are, but that's because the media finds them juicy and exciting to report on, and the conservative establishment finds the idea that a consumer can sue a corporation highly offensive. It is to both of their benefit that you think that they're a huge plague.) The problem in the US is people acting stupidly and wastefully because they think that lawsuits are a problem. And, as it turns out, that really is a significant problem.
 
Surely Apple should have a team of people who know how to make this work assisting such large educational purchasers with the setup, right?
 
960design said:
That is the hard part. Teaching teachers to use them as part of their curriculum has so far proven nearly impossible on a large scale. Sure we have a couple of teachers loaded up with Airserver on their laptops, streaming lessons via their iPad to a projector for the class. For the most part the students are far more educated than the teachers and getting the teachers to step off of their pedestal and learn as they teach is the challenge.
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We've been though this once before, when we introduced computers into classrooms. Some teachers took to them well, some didn't. Some found ways to work them into lessons, as we intended, while others used them to let kids who finished their work early play games on them (ugh!).

The changes will take time, but the good news is that retiring teachers who found the computers to be confusing or thought that learning to teach with them was too big a chore are gradually being replaced by newly trained teachers who come in the first day asking about the computers or tablets that their students will have.

And the future teachers who are just now getting their own education with ever-present technology won't know another way when it's their turn to teach. They'll be dragging their feet about some yet-unenvisioned newer technology that we invent and that that they're unfamiliar with!
 
Doctor Q said:
The massive iPad distribution in Los Angeles (an effort I'm involved in myself) had a 100% chance of having growing pains. Nobody should be surprised about that.

The first major problem showed up quickly, despite iPads having been issued to a handful of schools in a first-round test. The schools that are getting them now are the second round. IT will solve this problem, run into another, solve that problem, run into another, and so on. It's hard for a large school district to be light on its feet, but that's what IT will need to be.

Learning how best to use the iPads is another challenge. District teachers are receiving instruction in use of the iPads, both in general and specifically for the subjects they teach, but they didn't get much lead time. This school year is going to be a learning experience for all concerned.

I don't worry about the potholes in the road. I want us to keep our eyes focused on where the road leads. We'll learn our lessons and look for the right ways to use this technology when and where it can benefit K-12 students. It's not magic; it takes work. What happens in the classroom day-to-day is more important than the peripheral issues about "hacking", what to do about lost iPads, whether students will need keyboards (something that's not in the budget), and whatever else we hear about in the news.
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First, with this initiative, you have a ton of work ahead of you. I don't envy your task and I sincerely wish you and the rest of the District the best of luck. My wished of success are not only for the students but for a continued push to modernize education. That being said, two thing you mention worry me. It's hard as hell to teach. It has to be exponentially harder to teach while being taught. Could not more consideration have been given to the teachers skills before rolling this out? This isn't an indictment against the teachers. Far from it. I just think it has a better chance of success when the teachers are as versed as possible with the equipment as well as how they will utilize said equipment. Not being privy to the internal process leads me towards supposition regarding the teachers readiness (based on your quote).

Portion of your quote I bolded: This worries me more. A ton of well intended people have taken this attitude and done more harm than good... unintentionally. These are our children. Those potholes can derail their future and that road could potentially lead to an unfinished bridge. Oh sweet Jeebus that's dramatic:eek: Sorry. But seriously, a large part of the success of programs like these will be judged in the court of public opinion. Is it fair? No. Is it reality? Unfortunately yes. You probably know better than anyone that the peripheral issues, especially the negative ones, can adversely affect programs like these before they are given a chance to succeed. I don't think I'm venturing too far by saying the peripheral issues will affect the future budget more so than success or failure of the actual program. Again, reality.

I sincerely wish you and all in the District much success with this.
 
California's financial situation is already dire enough. LAUSD does not need to be spending money to provide students with devices to screw around on Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, and the like. That would be a colossal waste. I applaud the district for being hesitant to allow the program to turn into that. If students want iPads for leisure use, they should themselves purchase them.
 
FirstNTenderbit,

Thanks for helping me worry about these issues!

I would have liked to see teachers get their iPads well before their students had them in hand, and for teachers to have gotten much more professional development under their belts before they started using them. They received enough instruction to know how to handle the hardware, how to lock students into particular apps while in the classroom, and other mechanics, but not enough about how to use them for the lessons they teach.

I hope teachers won't use the iPads just because they are there, but only when they know what to use them for. The flipside is that "hands-on practice" for teachers really means having a classroom full of kids, not just an iPad to practice on during the preceding summer. At some point teachers had to face a room full of kids with tablets, and many of them simply wouldn't work very hard to prepare until it actually happened. What I think was most lacking was time and effort to identify good software ahead of time.

The way to keep the iPad potholes from doing real harm is for teachers to use the iPads only when it benefits their students. Teachers I talk to expect me to be 100% gung-ho about them using their computers and tablets every minute of the school day, but that's not the case. Use them if students will learn more, or more efficiently. That will become easier over time as the teachers gain experience. If some teachers leave the iPads on the shelf this semester it won't bother me a bit, although I'd like to know that they are studying the ways that they CAN or WILL use them.

What's unfortunate is that this year's students are guinea pigs. There's a lot of excitement among the kids, but I can't imagine that they will be taught quite as well as last year's students or next year's students.

The challenges to teachers brought about by the iPads is still nothing compared to the challenges that are thrown at them when the state changes curriculum standards, as they're doing in California. I don't know how teachers can be pushed and pulled so quickly and still be expected to be effective. Like most of life, the transitions are hard but they are ultimately necessary.
 
Col Ronson said:
because kids are stupid, one of them will meet a child predator using the iPad browsing the web, and then sue the school.
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If kids are stupid then I blame the parents. Who most of the time are children in Adult's bodies. The answer to pornography is education not censorship.
 
initial deployment with Configurator to install basic restrictions, update and MDM enrolment...

kid gets iPad, all apps they need preinstalled and the school can push out more and modify profiles etc.

if the students remove the profile, jailbreak the device or initialise the device, any apps they need disappear and they're hauled up, maybe referred to the SLA they signed when they received the iPad...

the school did none of these things...
 
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