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The whole "browser game" industry is built on this phenomenon. It's about getting kids on school laptops mindlessly looping on something while shoving ads in their face.

Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.

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What? Browser games were half of what made flash popular back in the day before laptops were even a normal consumer device.

You're spot on with classrooms not needing tech though. They add complications and distractions on top of an already difficult task.

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Flash was founded in 1993, and while desktops were much more popular laptops were indeed a product sold to consumers
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I grew up in the 2000s and I remember almost everyone in the computer lab would be playing Flash games, until someone came in and yelled at us because it wasn't "educational" enough.

They almost let us play RuneScape (something something medieval history?) until they saw me firebolt a rat and declared it unacceptably violent.

I visited my old school once, a few years after graduating, and was startled to see many people on their laptops in the hallways. I guess they had become required. I had graduated right around the time smartphones came out, and we didn't have laptops either. (You'd see a laptop at school occasionally but it was a rare sight.)

I'm glad the fanciest thing I had was a TI-84, because it got me to spend most of my time socializing, which I think was pretty good for my development.

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Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.
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TurnItIn.com was starting to be a thing when I was in high school. I found out it didn’t sanitize the papers you upload and had no CSRF protection, so I could upload a doc with inline JavaScript to hit the change-password and logout APIs.

Was pretty impactful for my education, just not in the intended way

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Way back when I was in school (2004 or so) I set up a proxy on my personal website to get around them blocking email, because I don’t want to have to save things to a damned floppy drive.

I then let a teacher use it because he was frustrated half of his search results would get blocked. From there, it spread like wildfire. Eventually they blocked it and from then on the IT guy would give me a side eye whenever we crossed paths.

Anyways, I can only imagine the clever ways kids get around things now. If it’s not per device, all a kid would need is a mobile hotspot to be king.

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Back in the day when every hotel that was charging for WiFi was stupidly leaving port 53 wide open, I wrote an IP over DNS tunnel to get free WiFi. Worked great until I went to a hotel in Tokyo and turned it on. Suddenly my network connection was completely dead. They were clearly watching for shenanigans. Took me a few minutes to figure out they had redirected my MAC address to the bit bucket. I spoofed my MAC to a different one, and then behaved, as well as admired those IT guys.
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Yeah, back when I was in school it was a cat and mouse game of finding a new proxy every week when the last one got blocked. The minute someone found a new one, it was everywhere.

I decided to sidestep the whole game and run my own proxy at home. I didn't have enough bandwidth for multiple users, so it was just me. I don't think IT ever caught on.

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My son is in middle school and it's the same thing. They can't have devices in the classroom, except for the school mandated device that does everything the phone does and more.
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Yeah it probably took about 15 seconds for the first kid to figure out that you could just share a google doc with your friends and use it for texting.
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It’s hard to imagine a slow, overworked, somewhat inept, bureaucratic school board, with a thousand other things it wants to care about, managing to stay ahead of thousands of crafty and highly motivated teens.
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It should be more simple devices with only helpful apps like books reader and learning videos player, not general access devices
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they brought laptops to cafeteria? outside? the core issue is usage of phones outside of the class, no? if he used it during the class, cool (we all gad boring teachers). if he was able to use it after the bell rang that is not having a ban
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