Comment by ToughKookie 4 days ago
This always seemed like a bad idea to me. I got done high school right before laptops were provided in schools all over the place. I never had one.
Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things? I figured they would be super restricted.
Nowhere did they mention social media :-) but emails and Teams work just fine - though one of my students mentioned they can't initiate chats. I'm sure there's workarounds. I just keep my students off laptops as much as possible.
Blocking games websites is like playing whack-a-mole. Our IT dept took all of our Year 7 and 8 students out two classes at a time, installing software or doing something to block a raft of websites.
They were back playing Retrobowl etc a day later. It was pretty funny.
In my experience, when the kids had iPads or Chromebooks all their traffic was routed through the school network and a web filer.
Yeah you could in theory get around it and kids did (generally to play minecraft), but social media was generally well blocked, and all traffic monitored. It is made very clear that these devices are NOT personal devices for personal activity / they're monitoring them.
> Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things?
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I think the actual interest is in playing games. (IO games, Minecraft online, etc.)
By the time they are old enough to be into social media (14+ years?), most here in the US have their own phones to provide internet access.