Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”
Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!
We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…
By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)
We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).
I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.
Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.
Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!
We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…
By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)
We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).
I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.
Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.
I guess it’s too much to ask for parental controls to actually function properly without significantly impairing students’ ability to learn.