I-Pads are Teaching Students-- How to Hack

[XLFD]

At the beginning of this school year, the Ludington Area School District handed out I-Pads to all of its students.  Parents were invited to come to a informational meeting in September to let them know what to expect, what was disabled or not permitted on the I-pad, and to have them sign permission to carry these powerful portable computers home.  Among those things we learned was that the camera features were disabled, strong filters were in place to exclude social media (including sites like the Ludington Torch), violent games, music videos, etc. and the children were informed on what was acceptable.  The I-pad would be a tool for educational purposes, not for exposing them to the dangerous parts of the internet or the games that are addictive but not educational.

I remember thinking at the time that I wasn't sure of anything other than there would be an industrious kid or two that would subvert those controls and protections, so that they could use the cameras, get on social media, watch music videos, play violent games, and view adult content.  And probably not get caught, until they share it with the rest of the school. 

Amazingly, I was not disappointed because within a week my daughter was using the camera to record movies and watch music videos, due to learning how to access those features from others.  As some parents learn of these capabilities and inform their kid's teachers, I am sure the school will try to regain control of the software, but the kids will still try to circumvent it and be successful eventually once again.  You almost have to love the unexpected learning potential this presents to kids as they learn to try and work around authority's controls. 

 

 

But Ludington Area Schools is not the only institution that has used I-Pads and found out that the students learn from them in an unexpected manner.  Last year, 40 tablet computers were delivered to the children of two remote Ethiopian villages. The villagers were 100 percent illiterate—the kids had never seen road signs, product labels, or printed material of any kind.

Technicians from the One Laptop Per Child program dropped off a stack of boxes, showed a couple of adults how to use the solar chargers, and then walked away. Within minutes, the kids had cracked the packaging open and figured out how to turn the tablets on. Within weeks, they were singing their ABCs, picked up from the English-language learning software installed on the tablets. Within five months, some kid figured out that the tablets had built-in cameras—they had been disabled for ethical reasons—and hacked the Android operating system to activate them.

 

In recent weeks, Los Angeles distributed I-Pads to 50,000 students in the public school system as part of a pilot for a $1 billion citywide initiative. Kids at Westchester High, one of the few schools that allowed students to take their tablets home, quickly noted that they could bypass the district-installed security filter with two clicks, allowing them to access banned sites like YouTube and Facebook.

One of the student hackers—if two clicks can be called “hacking”—was Westchester High valedictorian candidate Brian Young, who was hauled into the principal’s office for a dressing-down. “He wasn’t threatening me, but he told me millions of dollars of technology had been compromised because of me,” Young told the Los Angeles Times. Young said he fiddled with the security settings innocently, after having trouble getting online at home. Apparently, the I-Pads are configured to work well only on the limited in-school network. Young said he’d hoped to download some apps that the school’s network couldn’t handle or didn’t permit. We don’t know whether young Young was looking to download something to help with his math homework or whether he was pursuing … other extracurricular activities. But that didn’t stop school administrators and local media from panicking.

L.A. Unified School District Police Chief Steven Zipperman fretted in a confidential memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times that students would share their “hacks” via social media. “I’m guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube, or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,” Zipperman wrote. 

 

The whole point of introducing current technology into the classroom is to help education catch up with the rest of the world, which has been utterly transformed by fast computers with fast Internet access.  Unfortunately, when it comes to technology in education, traditional schools tend to use fuzzy math. "Give ’em I-Pads, the thinking goes, and the test scores will soar. The intended mechanism isn’t always clear, and the vision becomes even more muddled when the inevitable committees, unions, and concerned parents get involved. The result too often is restricted access to semi-useless tech crippled by proprietary software deals and censored Internet.

 

The kids outnumber the staff more than twenty to one, and often are more computer-savvy than their teachers.  Putting computers into the hands of kids and limiting their power with it is a sure recipe for empowering these children to innovations which the schools and parents may not find to their liking, even though it ironically can be one of the best learning experiences we can teach them in this brave new world.  To seek individual freedom and liberty against the wishes of the authorities who hope to restrict it.

[Willy]

This is another progressive waste of money. Kids need to learn without computers. Being tethered to an electronic device will not make them learn any better. getting the kids dependent on these types of equipment is a bad idea. I bet the ipad sales people have been making the rounds trying to convince the schools and the Administrators to buy into this foolish idea.

[XLFD]

It's definitely a costly experiment, and I would have to believe it cuts into the teacher-student based instruction, when it is introduced without a clear foundation of why and how it is to be used.  At these informational meetings and since, the schools have had plenty of time to trot out their iPad based curricula for all their grade levels, and I have yet to see one for any grade level or any iPad based assignments for homework. 

Furthermore, part of me is completely bummed out that my own personal computer is half as expensive as my daughter's is...