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Ungh | on: It Takes 16 Clicks for a Student to Open a PowerPoint on an iPad
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.

crazygringo | parent | next
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.

masfuerte | parent | next
Is this a state school? Government rules [1] say:

> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:

> [...]

> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...

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ianbicking | parent | next
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.
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cmiles74 | parent | next
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.
testplzignore | parent
> 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 :)

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