Among many changes in teachers, principal, constructions, Coppell High School students have a change with school devices, including a new iPad case with keyboard and an Apple Pen. Students first received their devices on the same day of the schedule pick up. 

As a school requirement, students must bring their school iPads to school everyday and use their devices whenever they have online tests or quizzes. After four weeks of school, students said they are experiencing both benefits and disadvantages to the new iPad policy.

On iPads, students can study through school provided apps, or turn in the assignments. There are some specific apps that strongly support student in visualizing, as well as creating creativity.

 “I feel like it’s really helpful because we have Apple Pen with,” CHS junior Nausheen Ahmed said. 

Along with the students, all teachers were also provided the iPads to support their teaching, as well as being able to identify the students activities on their devices.

 “I like the iPad, as we have a lot of different programs that are available so if they are all working, I think it will be much more uniform,” CHS Spanish I teacher Linda Grady said.  “We know what students have on the devices so we can teach them, plus we can do the Lock Down Browser, or see the screen activities from the Google Class, so if we can have the WiFI working, I think it will be great. I hope the lock down browser can reduce the cheating. As I usually have my students to do quizzes and tests on the paper. However, this year, I will have some changes as I will let my students to take more quizzes on their iPads than last year, but not the tests.” 

However, there are still disadvantages from the school iPads that affect the students works. 

One of the very common issues that CHS students have with their iPads at school and at home is WiFi. It is important for students to bring their devices to school as a required school supply. However, during some classes, students might not be able to use their iPads to search up the information as the WiFi connection is poor and they cannot load any websites.

Due to the WiFi issue, instead of working on iPads, many people choose to use their own devices at home as they can’t do anything on their iPad or it’ll be so slow to load the websites. 

“You need to restart your iPad,” CHS sophomore Maithilee Patil said. “Another way I usually do is turn off the VPN and then turn it on multiple times. If it still doesn’t work, then restart your device.”

Another concern about the school iPad is restrictions. The district limits every iPads with the amount of information to access, in the purpose of help students focusing more for their studies only. 

One of the district restrictions is the apps download limitations. For every iPad, there is a Manager app with an infinite apps list that students can download on it. This helps prevent a large amount of irrelevant applications from being downloaded to the iPad. 

However, on the other side, there are some apps that you need in specific classes for your study but they are not in the Manager list. The students, as well as teachers, would need to find ways to get the app and that process might take a long time. While searching information for assignments, many websites are blocked from the results. Some of these websites, such as the videos on YouTube, are educational and have many important and helpful information for doing work.

Recently, cheating has become one of our most concerns among the students. It highlights the fact that we need to spend more time focusing on come out with the solutions. Using the school iPads can help teachers know what their students are doing so the cheaters can’t be able to make mistakes anymore.

New school iPads have brought both advantages and disadvantages to students as well as the teachers. Beside the pros and cons of having this school device, many students expect to see their iPads fixed soon so that they can be able to work on them efficiently.

Follow Tracy on Twitter @AnhImtracy.