“A mother in Richmond, Virginia, is raising concerns about the use of laptop computers in her son’s high school. She says she is not the only parent whose worries about uncontrolled usage of the computers are being ignored by school officials,” Jim Brown and Jody Brown report for AgapePress.
“Three years ago, Henrico became the first county in the nation to purchase laptops for every secondary school student in the district. The school system signed a four-year, $24.2-million lease for the laptops as part of its vision to “close the digital divide.” The purchase of 23,000 iBooks, according to manufacturer Apple, constituted the single largest sale of portable computers in education ever,” Brown and Brown report.
“Under the school’s guidelines, students pay only a minimal insurance fee that covers loss, theft, or damage to the computer, and they have the option to purchase their laptop after four years at a reduced cost,” Brown and Brown report. “But Sally Booth, whose son attends Godwin High, says the policy was put in place quickly and without measures to block pornography. The Virginia mom contends that instead of furthering education, the multi-million-dollar investment has led to problems with students viewing porn, hacking into grades, and cheating.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: These sound like problems originating with the computer operators, not with the iBooks themselves. Perhaps the concerned parents should have worked harder on their respective computer operators upbringing? Then they’d realize that cheating, playing games, viewing porn, etc. on laptops provided by their school are not the proper things to do?
