MANUEL S. HERRERA: iPad Initiative - Restrictions and Responsible Use Policy

Another update on our iPad Initiative. I'm trying to play a little catch up with this post. The next step we took before we handed our students their iPads was to create a Responsible Use Policy. We reviewed various iPad RUPs before creating ours to help give us an idea of what we needed to include. The iPad RUP that we created is called, "iWill". Very creative, huh? Earlier in the year the students reviewed and signed a District Acceptable Use Policy but we felt that the iPads needed a little extra attention. It's not perfect, but then again what is. What we wanted to do was create some dialog between the teachers and students on the purpose of their iPads. I've included a sample of what we included in our "iWill" at the bottom of this post. Please let us know if you have any suggestions on how we could make it better.

In addition to the "iWill" RUP and the classroom discussion, we enabled various restrictions on the iPad. I've included a screen shot from one of the devices. I'm sure many of you will say, "Wow. That's a lot of restrictions!" Remember, this is new to us and we would like to avoid some of the potential mistakes that may happen. These devices are also shared. Therefore, one teacher may not be ready to manage a classroom set with all the bells and whistles. I'd like to share our thoughts behind the restrictions and get any of your feedback.

FaceTime - We may look to open it up for certain projects. This is more of a student safety concern.

Ping - Managing a social network for music is not a priority right now.

Deleting Apps - Why would we want kids to do this?

Location - It's enabled. Just locked.

Email - We plan to open this up very soon with an email address. As of now, we just have not figured out how we will manage it. Will we have one email for all 30 devices or one for each.

Allowed Content - We set these according to the age of our students.
In-App Purchases - There is not a credit card on file with the Apple ID's that we are using but we would still like to avoid any accidental charges.