I agree with your overall point, but not this one.
The problem I see here is that the laptop is owned by the school and as such storing your passwords means the school can retrieve the laptop they’ve assigned to you and snoop on you. They may even do this remotely.
In the end the basic problem is there is no possible way for you to trust something you don’t own. A problem that needs fixing.
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That’s more something we should drum into children than something we should try to fix.
That implies truly remarkable muscle memory because touch typists do depend on the mechanical feedback to keep their hands located over the keyboard. That’s why there are the tiny bumps on the home keys.
I wouldn’t argue at all that glass keyboards do not have advantages for some applications, though I feel that using them for musical instruments and the like is depriving children of tactile experience - using tablets as musical instruments or for painting is perceptually thin compared to the real thing. In this case the comparison isn’t tablet versus laptop but tablet versus keyboard or brush. We look to be heading into a world in which only rich kids will get to play real instruments, which is sad.
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But isn’t that a two way street? You don’t trust the school/business issued laptop, but why should they trust your personally provided one? You gaining access to the inside of their network with unknown hardware, running unknown software is just as big an issue for them as them potentially snooping on you. I’m not saying either position is justified, but the potential to exploit goes both ways. If that’s the case perhaps 3rd party web accessed “apps” would be the best route, of course your still going to need to provide some type of identifying information to access them, so there’s that privacy aspect again.
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I disagree re: musical instruments and art.
They are not a replacement to physical instruments or art supplies- but as a complement, they’re amazing. In a music class, it means every student has the capacity to record, upload, edit, compose, etc. Art class can now (easily) do more animation, or 3d modeling, or (in a case I’ve seen) a weird hybrid where a iPad is placed screen-down on analog photo paper to make a print in a wet darkroom. It’s the addition, not the substitution that makes it work so well.
For what it’s work regarding keyboards- many of the students I’ve worked with would rather thumb type on a phone/tablet than use a “regular” keyboard. And, in my experience, the speed of their typing is seldom the bottleneck to their productivity.
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Really? I thought that Google made money through advertising because it can use the data it has to show you stuff that you’re actually interested in, and can charge a premium to advertisers for that (being able to show that American political ads aren’t getting served to people in the UK, sanitary towel ads aren’t getting served to men, or walking tents ads are only being shown to people interested in hiking).
Google’s advertising isn’t selling a information about you as a commodity. It’s selling a service to one set of clients (advertisers) that they can have their adverts shown to extremely specific sections of another set of clients (users).
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Right, because the last thing I want to do is buy an affordable computer for my kid, who last month smashed the tablet screen that the family shared.
Is it possible to get a computer that is both affordable and non-Orwellian that doesn’t require everybody to remember their hundreds of passwords.
(I exaggerate, I myself have only 135 entries in Passpack, although many of them are doubled-up, and others are not even in the account.)
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And you’re qualified to answer, because you’re 7 years old?
Which is why I think its a problem that needs fixing,
The way things are set up now, where we cannot trust each other because we assume (rightly so) that every player involved in an electronic interaction will be greedy (In fact, even third parties not directly involved will try to get in on the action). Everybody, down to the computer manufacturer will try to spy on you, which in turn means that a well meaning user will wind up leaking his employers information without his knowledge, and every browser, extension and app on your phone will be trying to do the same.
Trust in this sense is not the trust between just two parties, that’s simple.
I know your comment is on topic and this really isn’t a dig, but the “first world problem” meter just friggen exploded.
FYI LastPass is free so logging in can be pretty much automatic.
The core issue, if you will, with a monolith like FB or Google, where you login once, is that everything you do online is (basically) recorded and this becomes a real concern for the wee ones for many, many reasons - but creating an Internet profile that will stay with someone their whole life which started when they were in the third grade & before they could consent?!? What could possibly go wrong? There is a reason people used to keep library activities private, & why the PA overturned that right.
…but your FWP gets to the heart of an (some may say the) issue with security & privacy - big companies that want your data make it oh so convenient to let them have it. Privacy always necessitates awareness & security always requires precaution. It may seem like these are onerous acts, and one has to ask, are they onerous for a reason? Couldn’t the monoliths bake security & privacy in so, without doing a thing, you wouldn’t have any data about you tracked? Yup!, but you’re paying their billion dollar evaluations one click at a time as you tell them everything about what you like, think & feel.
The question that really has to be asked is: will it really take another Snowden before we realize this information is being abused?
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The whole point of advertising is to sell products, yes, Google doesn’t tell their advertisers, Steve wants to buy a product, but in the end, advertising is successful if Steve does indeed buy a product.
Sure, we the users get a service for free and in the meantime we get to believe we were going to buy a Lumio anyway, but either way, google ads are only worth as much as we the consumers spend.
There, I fixed it for you. It would be difficult indeed to learn how to code without eventually coming into contact with some sort of computational device…
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Yes:
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Awesome, I’ll get one apiece each for my wife and my 5-year old for Xmas, and let you know how it turns out.
I bet it will go swimmingly.
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Could you explain the distinction/difference?
From the article:
The rules around data-collection and kids are complicated and full of loopholes. Though they seem, on the surface, to forbid Google from creating an advertising profile of kids using school-issued laptops, the reality is that kids are profiled as soon as they click outside of the Google education suite – so when a kid watches a Youtube video, her choice is added to an advertising profile that’s attached to her school ID.
So that’s only staying with them until they leave school, and is only tied to them at school.
Now there’s a novel use for those Project Wing drones. Google Parenting. 
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But Google’s clients in this scenario, the ones actually paying them money, are the advertisers, not the users.
What’s your opinion?
Well, to be fair, you didn’t list easy as one of your criteria.
That being said, there are Pi-centric distros that are geared toward children, and the basic Linux distro is similar to any other standard desktop/window/folder-type OS.
I didn’t say that they had to build the thing themselves, only that it is a viable option for the underfunded. I also guarantee you that your local Craigslist is rife with 5 year-old laptops under $100 that will run a basic Linux distro with GUI.
I believe you ‘misunderstood’ the use of hyperbole for rhetorical flourish there, but yes, closer to that than the opposite. Clearly, from the high ground, you can see that?
