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

[PracticalMac]

Fort Bend, Texas also put a huge effort to install iPad's, but management completely dropped the ball.

I also don't see much of Apples Education effort here.

IMHO, I think Apple need to do a much better job, deliver complete district wide installation programs, and a "Education" section for its iOS developers section (custom version of enterprise).

Just sayin.

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

That old "At Ease" software in school never kept me out of the system. It was easily breakable

This is no surprise either when you set restrictions on kids. They will always find a way around it. Apple should hire kids for their security department

 

[donutbagel]

I'm ashamed to live in this city. Worthless leadership everywhere. One thing's for sure, LA is never going to get any of my taxes in the future.

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This is no surprise either when you set restrictions on kids. They will always find a way around it. Apple should hire kids for their security department

Yeah really, there is always a group of kids that is better than the IT department.

 

[donutbagel]

I praise the students, keep hacking the system! The students will learn from this, and the system will get stronger. Win-win.

But I'll bet the unionized school employees are charging the schools some ridiculous amount of money to fix them.

 

[Doctor Q]

That old "At Ease" software in school never kept me out of the system. It was easily breakable

It worked well enough for us. On the other hand, when I used At Ease it was at an elementary school, so those kids were barely learning the basics of hacking.

High schoolers with Internet access are hard to stop with any security measures because they know how to share the collective wisdom.

 

[guzhogi]

This is it right here. No desire to spend time and resources helping the students learn digital citizenship.

I don't think it's really about digital citizenship, but citizenship in general. Just living in a world & not thinking that you can get whatever you want whenever you want it, & not caring how it affects anyone/anything else.

 

[MacDav]

Maybe they missed the option where the user can't remove a profile, set up by Apple Configurator...

School board Network Specialist: Apple Configurator? Hmmm. I'm a Windows
XP guy, and I hate Apple.

 

[mrxak]

The iPad is a learning tool on multiple levels

Indeed, I'd say this was educational for all involved. When I was growing up, in the middle school and high school computer labs there was quite a bit of unscheduled computer education going on. Bypassing their systems was half the fun of using the computers, and we learned plenty. Heck, the students even knew the password to the substitute teacher account. It was "sub" .

 

[ValSalva]

Indeed, I'd say this was educational for all involved. When I was growing up, in the middle school and high school computer labs there was quite a bit of unscheduled computer education going on. Bypassing their systems was half the fun of using the computers, and we learned plenty. Heck, the students even knew the password to the substitute teacher account. It was "sub" .

"sub". My gosh that's pathetic I know that I want the people taking care of me when I get old to know what's going on and not just be pushing buttons on whatever future computers as though they were working a cash register at a fast food joint. Curiosity cannot be underestimated.

 

[i4m]

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.

Because they are school-issued iPads, meant for specific purposes.
Parents care too!

And being smart and circumventing controls in place is not exactly the same thing.

 

[Rajani Isa]

If it was done right, this wouldn't have happened. This one is obviously on the IT department, not the students fault.

While it seems the IT probably hit a pothole that could have been avoided, but this was at a high school. These "kids" should know better, and need to learn that they are not really "kids" any long, but moving to "young adult" - which means their actions are going to have increasingly permanent and severe consequences.

Yup.

If they don't want the kids reading Facebook, Twitter, etc... they should just do content filtering at the district level. Then once the students get home, let them be on those sites if they want.

And then someone downloads porn to the iPad and brings it to school.

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.

While part of it is to keep the students off the porn sites (or other sites that might have content - malware, etc - they want kept off the pads) the other part of this is to keep the students *on focus* - I believe Doctor Q mentioned being able to open/lock to certain apps in the class via these profiles? And internet browsing can be quite distracting.

IMHO, I think Apple need to do a much better job, deliver complete district wide installation programs, and a "Education" section for its iOS developers section (custom version of enterprise).

Just sayin.

For Apple to be able to supply complete "district Wide" packages, they'd basically have to be willing to supply new software and hardware for everything.

Different schools have different networks, managed in somewhat different ways. This is a result of the fact that computers were add bit by byte, from the days of no networks, to simple networks, to the internet.

 

[Doctor Q]

I don't think it's realistic to think we can prevent high school students from bypassing a security system. You can't just lock down all network use since students are supposed to use Internet resources and various apps for their schoolwork. While reasonable safeguards that restrict (protect?) most students most of the time are worthwhile, to avoid casual encounters with unsafe sites, they aren't going to be foolproof. So don't expect them to be and don't claim that they are.

Software does part of the job. The rest should be based on shared responsibility. LAUSD could explain that it has safeguards in place, but that there may be ways in which they can be bypassed. That's where school-parent-student agreements should take over. Parents and students should have to agree, in writing, that the student may not purposely bypass the restrictions. It's hard to devise consequences for this that don't also limit their ability to do their homework on these devices, but one possibility is that they have to do all homework in the library after school, under supervision, and not take the device home afterwards. This might discourage students from bypassing security even if their friends tell them how. It might also help with the school district liability issues, because if an agreement was violated by the student and the school district said up front that it makes reasonable but not necessarily foolproof efforts, it's a lot harder to argue that the school district is responsible for any harm that resulted.

 

[jimi78]

doom to fail

iPads will never be able to reach that "learning tool" level since they were introduced to us as entertainment devices. Kids especially will have a hard time not seeing these things as anything more than that and kids will work extra hard when their choice of entertainment is being jeopardized. Maybe save the iPads for the classes that have the AP students that will seriously want to learn and see where it goes from there. Heck if the smart kids who want to succeed won't even use the iPads for education purposes then what do you expect from the other population of students?

my $0.02

 

[hyhybt]

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.

Waste of what, exactly? The devices cost precisely the same whether students can only use them for schoolwork or can also do whatever they want on their own time.

 

[macs4nw]

because kids are stupid, one of them will meet a child predator using the iPad browsing the web, and then sue the school.

Been watching Dateline's 'To Catch A Predator' too, have you?…..lol
If that were to happen, no doubt some smart lawyer would give the family ideas to that effect.

About that headline: Human ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to improving one's life. The geniuses who set this up, were no match for that.

 

[roadbloc]

This isn't surprising one bit. I broke my school network and software restrictions on several occasions. The IT staff at my school were downright inept at times.

 

[charlituna]

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).

That's where they need something like iOS 7 and activation lock. And a deal with Apple to lock all devices from in store service etc. That way the kids can DFU it, get locked out and then try to get it wet or such so it won't turn on and get it swapped for one that will activate etc (although I've heard the system knows if it's locked or at least has find my iPhone even if it is powered off and if you don't know the password you can't get service so that might solve that)

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Fort Bend, Texas also put a huge effort to install iPad's, but management completely dropped the ball.

I also don't see much of Apples Education effort here.

It's not Apples job to handle this. They made Configurator, etc. If schools don't use it, they can't be found at fault.

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Waste of what, exactly? The devices cost precisely the same whether students can only use them for schoolwork or can also do whatever they want on their own time.

Bu the cost/benefit is different. The point of these devices is the notion that they can help educate the kids so they get good grades and good test scores and the district can get more federal funding which is based on those two factors (mostly test scores). And produce kids that go to college etc.

Letting a kid play around on Facebook and post selfies etc doesn't help with that.

 

[BerlingerT]

Been watching Dateline's 'To Catch A Predator' too, have you?…..lol
If that were to happen, no doubt some smart lawyer would give the family ideas to that effect.
.

You bet they would. Some of the things parents can get away with if they complain to the school about are downright ridiculous. Some parents can exempt their children from State Testing and Progress Testing in certain grade levels because one kid in some school found a state test question "too personal".

At least, that's what I heard from a family member who's a teacher.

 

[hyhybt]

Bu the cost/benefit is different. The point of these devices is the notion that they can help educate the kids so they get good grades and good test scores and the district can get more federal funding which is based on those two factors (mostly test scores). And produce kids that go to college etc.

Letting a kid play around on Facebook and post selfies etc doesn't help with that.

Yes, the cost/benefit is different. Specifically, there is *extra cost* to trying to stop them from using Facebook on their own time, with no benefit whatsoever. (If they're using it in school, that's a different matter, but likewise can be blocked by the school network rather than on the individual device.)

 

[charlituna]

Yes, the cost/benefit is different. Specifically, there is *extra cost* to trying to stop them from using Facebook on their own time, with no benefit whatsoever. (If they're using it in school, that's a different matter, but likewise can be blocked by the school network rather than on the individual device.)

They don't see it that way. And if they had done it properly there really wouldn't be that much extra cost.

Remember these are district policy so they have a right to restrict them.

 

[hyhybt]

They don't see it that way. And if they had done it properly there really wouldn't be that much extra cost.

Remember these are district policy so they have a right to restrict them.

I never even suggested they didn't have a *right* to restrict them. Their doing so is foolish, and essentially is control for its own sake rather than anyone's genuine benefit, but so far as I can see, nobody's claiming it isn't within their legal right.