I was part of the first school year where my district implemented a one-to-one laptop/student policy. Our school district got a fat grant the year before, because they implemented a drug-testing policy and used the money to buy each student a MacBook Air.

It was a complete disaster. There were some positives to it, but it really changed everything from there on.

Our IT department was ran by 3 guys, spread across a high school, middle school, and 6 elementary schools. They had no idea what they were doing most of the time. We had some Windows machines in the drafting classroom, my profile became corrupted, preventing me from being able to log in. The admin couldn’t figure out how to delete my profile, and insisted that I just used someone else’s login. I also lost work because he couldn’t figure out how to sign in as an administrator, and yank my files from my user folder.

We had full admin rights on those computers, and the MDM (JAMF) was not installed correctly allowing us to uninstall it. Many of us ran pirated software.

The biggest thing was cheating. It just became so easy. The school couldn’t do anything about it because all the answer keys were being uploaded to Quizlet, which was a service many teachers were using for study guides.

The school tried to block iMessage from working on these machines, and failed miserably. We figured out how to bypass it within the first week of implementation.

Since I’ve graduated, they’ve made a lot of changes for the better in terms of device management. However, I have no idea about how the classrooms have changed since.

Furthermore, this school district did a horrible job of teaching kids how to use computers. They did typing lessons, but didn’t ever explain how to use the computers. So when the laptops came in, many students had no idea what a file was or how to submit them to the LMS.

I at the least can be thankful that they gave us actual computers, rather than Chromebooks. I work in secondary education now, and so many students have Chromebooks because that’s what their school taught them how to use. They have no clue what software is, and only know how to share a document through Google Docs, rather than getting the file exported as a .pdf or .docx and properly submitted into the LMS.

IMO Chromebooks have ruined a generation. Especially since schools forced this upon the masses.