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Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

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Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#81

Post by switch007 »

gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

There are plenty of better ways. You make the student auth in some manner then grant an exception from your own computer.

Entering the password on the student’s BYOD is pretty stupid

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#82

Post by aaronblohowiak »

gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

> It's not clear how they avoid the situation however; do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices?

the target of the exception and the device granting the exception do not need to be the same device necessarily. if you have that figured out then yes only allow password entry on locked-down devices.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#83

Post by aww_dang »

abrookewood wrote: post #71
1letterunixname wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The culture of no" demands obedience and forbids anything remotely fun. Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.

C'mon ... the reality is that teachers need the kids to concentrate and given a choice between doing work and playing games, the games are likely to win. Teachers are being put in an impossible situation.

I think the premise here is that curiosity is the source of learning. Without it, students are just going through the motions. Learning becomes a form of drudgery. Cleverness emerges as method of solving the meta-problem of institutionalism. Švejk-like behavior becomes the norm where passionate learning could have been cultivated.

Under these premises, teachers in standardized environments are already in an impossible situation.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#84

Post by bandyaboot »

hanselot wrote: post #78
abrookewood wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon ... the reality is that teachers need the kids to concentrate and given a choice between doing work and playing games, the games are likely to win. Teachers are being put in an impossible situation.

I have quite a number of fond memories of how we hid pokemon blue and gameboy emulators on every machine in our school's computer lab (from around 1999-2003). We were also the kids who were the most into computers at the time, and eventually the teacher realised that if they were on our side, they could use us to help teach the other kids basic computer skills (office, etc), by using games as the incentive. If you ca…

I don’t see how that applies here. It’s not just a handful of kids that are most into computers that would rather use their devices to play games at school than do school work.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#85

Post by aidenn0 »

pdntspa wrote: post #67
sharkweek wrote: post #7

As with many here I'm sure, during "computer lab" I was often done with assignments quite quickly all through school. The teachers rarely had any extra work to assign me so they pretty much gave me carte blanche to use my time however I wanted as long as it was on the computer. Great memories of trying to skirt school "blockers" in order to get to gaming websites in high school (this would have been in the early 00s)…

oh man I remember the days of converting gamespy.com's IP to octal to get around the school's firewall block thing Hell I even made a counter-strike map of the campus and surrounding suburban downtown where the terrorists bomb the school's proxy server so the students can have unrestricted internet! Man that would have gone over so well nowadays... edit: or the time I got around their EXE blocking by changing a bunch…

I always made the exe look like mspaint

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#86

Post by aaronblohowiak »

marssaxman wrote: post #46
wildzzz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, no devices in their hands after bedtime. Your child isn't some busy tech professional that needs to be on call for work emails. They can live without having their iPad and iphone in their room. When I got caught as a kid playing my Gameboy when I should have been asleep, I lost my free access to it and could only use it when homework and chores were completed. Once play time was over, they took it back because…

> Easy, no devices in their hands after bedtime. This is no longer so easy after your kid realizes they can simply wait until you fall asleep, then sneak into your room and filch the machine from wherever you've stashed it.

it depends how adversarial boundary setting is..

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#87

Post by safety1st »

bandyaboot wrote: post #79
1letterunixname wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The culture of no" demands obedience and forbids anything remotely fun. Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.

Well kids don’t tend to be great at thinking about long term consequences or moderating their time spent having fun, so how would you have the lazy pencil pushers handle the problem of kids being distracted by games at school?

Using Scratch to create programs is one of those cases where a kid can learn and have fun at the same time. Sounds like the best possible sort of activity to encourage at school. So what if the programs are games?

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#89

Post by aidenn0 »

digitallyfree wrote: post #42

> “One kid kept opening up game sites” said one high school teacher who asked to stay anonymous, to protect the identities of their students. “I would wait for them to open one, add it to my list of blocked websites, refresh my settings, and then they would get locked out of it. Then they would open a new tab, find a new game site, and the cycle would repeat. This happened over and over over the course of about half…

At least at the school my kids go to, the staff is basically not allowed to discipline students for minor infractions.

There were kids leaving trash out after lunch, and one of the staff had the worst offenders pick up trash before leaving the lunch room. This practice was banned because it was "degrading."

That's just the most recent story, there are dozens others like it.

More on topic, we got a letter from the teacher that my son was playing games. I said "why not just take the Chromebook away when that happens?"

The response: oh we can't do that.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#90

Post by diffeomorphism »

adriand wrote: post #5

This relates to something that has been bugging me lately, which is as a parent I have zero parental control over the devices that our school board issues to my children. My kids have iPhones and iPads, which are part of my Apple family account, and I can both monitor what they are doing and also set limits on screen time including hours of usage and for particular apps. However, I recently became aware that my son w…

Since thus far all solutions proposed have been technological or taking devices away, I would suggest "parenting". Talk to your child and convince them. Them "having access" is not the problem (they will have that everywhere). It is how they overuse that access and here is where a parent should do their job instead of trying to hide the problem by removing access.
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