It Takes 16 Clicks for a Student to Open a PowerPoint on an iPad
reddit.comThis feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
Glad I skipped out on this by being older. All the kids I know hate Clever and IXL. They are basically curse words to them.
That's the crazy thing, it looks like Clever is a SSO solution that's making it take much longer to sign in.
The walled corporate garden - time to switch away from big tech.
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
Seems like as much of an indictment on the services stack the school chose as it is a problem inherent to the iPad.
Well, that tracks.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
I remember bashing out papers on my iPod Touch while I rode the bus to school, then emailing them to my student address and printing them out in the library. For a master procrastinator, it felt like the future.
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
Why is any login required at all? Is this sensitive information that needs authentication?
it's to a school account. so yeah, it need authentication.
Students use the same platform to submit homework.
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.
It’d be like giving a monkey a machine gun.
Most of what people do with it is muscle memory. Everyone would be instantly broken. They are if anyone changes or moves anything already.
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
> I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)
I’ve joked about that a couple of times as well :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
The School based chromebook horror show is something else.
Google Docs/Slides/Sheets masquerading as EdTech
5 clicks/touches on YT mobile to close a video. iOS version, but I assume others are the same. I use the mobile app a whole lot less because of it.
16 is insane, though.
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video. what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
This example shows that capitalism is great for innovation but it can suck for creating a streamlined UX.
Big Tech eventually enshittifies everything; it has to for the financial scaling economics to work out.