iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
Is it just grading and parental access?
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Back in my day we double clicked a ppt on a flash drive, and we liked it!
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
The example in this story is to do with other cruft that schools have installed.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:
> [...]
> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...
It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
16 is insane, though.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
It’s like, they are right in the middle of the tech gadget spectrum, and they want to be a bit of everything but are not really good at anything.
PCs, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches all have the right form factor for what their use is. Tablets? Meh.
1. Open canvas on laptop
2. Open canvas quiz
3. Write answers on paper
4. Scan paper with office lens
5. Export document from office lens
6. Upload document to google drive
7. Open google drive on laptop
8. Download document from google drive
9. Upload document to canvas
10. Realize you forgot to write your student id on page 2, write and go back to step 4
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.