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Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

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Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#231
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits For kids? How ever did anyone survive before 1990.

You never used a pay phone as a kid?

Amusingly, at Caltech the only phone in the dorm was a payphone down the hall. The only time I recall ever using it was to make flight reservations to visit my parents.

My first cellphone was in 1994 or so. It took many years before I was acclimated to using it, and didn't get an internet phone until 2015.

I was a very early adopter of computers, but pretty late with phones.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#232
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never used a pay phone as a kid?

I was born in 1955 in the UK and I almost never used a phone of any kind as a child.

I used the two cans and a string phone as a kid. Only one channel on TV!

I built an intercom from a kit when older, but it was useless as yelling worked better.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an electromagnetic radiation expert, but I know my garage door opener has a useful range of about 10 feet, and my wifi about 30 feet.

It's difficult to explain accurately without making one into an RF expert but you've essentially said the radio equivalent of "my headphones aren't really useful past 10 feet" and concluding any sound so loud as to make the headphone use unintelligible across an entire school would also cease to exist a few feet away. If one absolutely had to get rid of usable signals originating from outside the school a much more p…

Another way to jam would be to spoof being a tower. The cell phones would uselessly connect to the school tower. Since phones transmit their location, the spoofer could "geofence".

Or even ask the local cell phone tower people to geofence the school.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walter's comment could be applied exactly as well to an argument that there shouldn't be electricity in schools (after all, kids survived without electricity just fine for decades).

I've made the comment before that all the schools really need is a classroom, desks and chairs, a chalkboard, and a teacher. Pen & notepaper helps. The rest is just useless fluff. Note that Caltech was exactly that. A prof, a chalkboard, a lecture hall. I learned more in 2 weeks with that than a year of high school. I've suggested to college students that they'll learn better if they leave their laptops in the dorm.…

You need much more than that for a good education. While I do agree that smart devices are not necessary, you still need a lot of extra materials for most subjects. You need various kinds of maps for geography and history, you need many images of animals and plants for biology, you need teaching manuals for every subject, you need various books for literature to read poems and prose, you need various materials for arts and crafts. Not to mention when you get to advanced subjects you need a heck of a lot more, at least for practice.

Having many of these materials in a digital format on a smart device can help a lot in terms of cost and availability. It's not critical, and I very much understand the downsides of having an always-connected device that kids are used to play with, but it's also not at all 0 cost to go entirely to paper.

I'm sure your time in math classes at Caltech that were only chalkboard and notes was extremely productive. But some lectures require more materials (you can't have a good lecture on Alexander's conquests without a map of what he actually conquered), and a full education requires much more than lectures. You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#235

I went to high school when cell phones were common and most students had them. But, at least at my school, if you had one out during class it was instantly confiscated and returned by the front office after school. I assumed this was the norm, so articles about "cell phone bans" as a new policy are surprising to me. I assumed it always was this way. When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? Do teac…

> When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? I wonder to what extent this is an effect of the age of the teachers themselves. The median age of a teacher in the US is ~40 years old, so a significant proportion of them are accustomed to phones being an essential part of social life and hence may be a bit more lenient to students occasionally checking their phone when it appears to be non-disruptive.…

No, it's 100% the parents. The parents are younger, and phone addicted too. And I don't know what happened in the past 20 ish years but parents are unbelievably entitled.

Many parents freak out if you take their kid's phone. That's not okay anymore, I guess. Detention doesn't really exist either because parents don't want it. Even summer school is just a suggestion at this point. Parents have bullied their local ISD's into being weak.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a health monitor need to be in constant connection with the internet? If there's a problem, it can just beep at you. Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer. For wildfire, call the principal who then hits the fire button. We had tornado drills in elementary sch…

>Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer. A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.

I don't understand, do you guys think the children's phones are being vaporized by the Phone Vaporizer 5000?

When people say "no phones in class" they don't mean kid's can't have phones. They mean they can't use their phone in class.

I think, probably, this rule does NOT apply during an active shooter. That's my guess. I would imagine the teacher isn't going to start enforcing that rule while under lockdown. What do you think?

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive. This is by definition invasive; having the device maker or OS maker integrate it makes it more invasive, not less.

I don't think we're using the same definition of invasive. To me, invasive would be a solution that compromises the privacy of the child or parents or both. Apple's work on driver's licenses comes to mind. The deep integration is exactly what allows such a feature to not be invasive. Limits on what "School Mode" can actually do and the actual implementation approach will determine whether or not such a feature is inv…

We definitely have different definitions. "can't use your device" is obnoxious but not invasive. "we control what you can and can't do with your device", no matter what mechanism it uses, is invasive. Think "invasive" in terms of "invades the boundaries of".

If the TSA seizes my (still-encrypted-and-locked) device, that's obnoxious and wrong, but not invasive. If they try to get me to unlock it so they can see what's on it, that's invasive (and will get a "no", followed by them deciding if they want to escalate to seizing it or not).

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#238
post #173
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard a good, convincing explanation as to why on earth children need iPads for any reason. Are the schools just not doing their jobs, and letting the iPads "teach" the children rather than a person doing it?

My backpack in primary school times was about 3kgs on worst days - school lockers aren't a thing here. We carried our books, notebooks, exercises, PE suit, boots and lunch day after day; home to school and back again - a scoliosis story /s. Secondary school times were more chill - while it was mandatory to have all of that stuff, teachers were turning blind eyes. So slowly seeing how tablets or laptops are replacing…

That's a really good point. My kids have tablets but they barely carry books. They could probably get 90% of the same stuff done if they were given an eReader instead of a tablet. It would have several benefits now I think about it.

* frame rate sucks too much for tik-tok to be any good

* easier on the eyes

* useless for doing homework on, so the kids go back to paper where they have to show their work anyway.

I dunno this might be the way. Instead of artificially limiting platforms, let the platform's natural limitations do the work.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#239
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you enforce this without invasive surveillance? How could a teacher check that school mode is on without gaining control of the device? How could they ensure that the mode isn't turned off when they aren't looking?

This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive. Another approach would be beacon-based, where the devices would operate with limited capability if in range of an actively broadcasting cryptographically secure “At School” beacon. I think there are plenty of ways to do this without surveil…

If this wasn't mandated by law, this would inevitably create a market for devices and tweaks that didn't support this (mis)feature.

Older devices, jailbroken iPhones, rooted Androids or just straight up Chinese knock-offs would be a lot more desirable in such a world, and Tiktok would make sure that the smart kids knew how to break their devices themselves. The not-so-smart ones would inevitably have smarter buddies willing to do them a favor in exchange for a few bucks.

You'd also have to be extra careful to prevent misconfigured beacons and overzealous school administrators from interfering with the phones of neighbors, staff, those who have an exception, or even random passers by.

Re: Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to explain accurately without making one into an RF expert but you've essentially said the radio equivalent of "my headphones aren't really useful past 10 feet" and concluding any sound so loud as to make the headphone use unintelligible across an entire school would also cease to exist a few feet away. If one absolutely had to get rid of usable signals originating from outside the school a much more p…

Another way to jam would be to spoof being a tower. The cell phones would uselessly connect to the school tower. Since phones transmit their location, the spoofer could "geofence". Or even ask the local cell phone tower people to geofence the school.

Spoofing is, by definition, not jamming but in terms of the goal if you combined a multi carrier spoofer with a DAS you could theoretically get things down to ~a million $ per high school on average and not horrifically leak signal as if you just stood up a spoofer and centrally blasted it out. It's also still carrier and technology generation specific though. I.e. if a new carrier/MVNO appears or an existing carrier rolls out new frequency bands then you need to replace the system. If it's a new technology (e.g. 5G) then you need to replace the system. If things just change in general (new MVNO on existing bands), you at least need to maintain the system accordingly (but might not have to replace it). You'd also need to convince the majority of people this is something all public companies should be mandated to support, which is a separate issue from convincing the majority of people this general approach should be taken, or you'll never get much compliance. All of that accounted for, the solution still brushes against needing to fix physics a bit in that lowers SNR in a many times larger area than the accepted dead zone - though not as badly as a jammer system.

Geofencing with cooperation of the local carriers is technically possible (with big downsides) in that if a phone is connected to 3+ towers you can decently get the position tower side to within several hundred meters (or worse) in an urban area. That means to reliably geofence a building you're still going to screw up anyone in the surrounding city blocks trying to drive by, use their phones at home/work, and so on regularly. It also still impacts noise (therefore connection quality), though not as bad, over a much large area than is excluded. You could also theoretically mandate that all devices have device side geofencing which uses the extra data from phone side (more than just tower connection data, BSSID or other local signal data) were you convince people to mandate public companies on this one as well (and even then there will be "old" devices for many years a la retiring 3G lest you want to convince everyone to throw their current devices away on top of the extra forced hardware monitoring ability). The cost for this would largely escape the schools by becoming a cost to carriers/hardware manufacturers.

Or you could, again, just build schools with RF shielding if this is really the path you want to go down. It'll probably have a higher up front cost but it'd achieve the goal for every high speed cellular service current and future without requiring any external mandates or external interference. It's still a bit silly compared to other funding requests schools typically have but it would solve the problem if the public prioritized it.

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