The Los Angeles Unified School District is in the process of rolling out iPads to all of its students in 47 K-12 schools. It’s a huge educational partnership for Apple, and the goal is to have students use the iPads to help learn the curriculum.
Apparently LAUSD didn’t anticipate that students would be able to easily hack around the security measures on the iPads and use them to surf the web and download apps. Hundreds of students at Theodore Roosevelt High School have already broken the restrictions, and the district is considering halting the iPad rollout until it figure out what to do.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Following news that students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.
It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Theodore Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the district.
In this instance, bypassing the iOS restrictions in place isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s as easy as uninstalling the educational profile in the iPad’s Settings app. Thinking that students wouldn’t find a way to get around it immediately was naive on the district’s part.
Apple has included new MDM options in iOS 7 that let teachers remotely lock or unlock iOS devices into a specific app. Educational institutions are still exploring how to implement iOS devices in the classroom. Schools named after Steve Jobs in The Netherlands only use iPads to teach.
You can watch the story’s accompanying news segment out of LA below:
Source: The Los Angeles Times
