It can be a steep learning curve if your child needs a notebook or tablet in the classroom, especially if their school offers little guidance.
The night before the first day of school was once spent polishing school shoes and writing names on textbooks, but these days you can also find yourself installing software updates and creating online accounts. While many schools insist that students bring high-tech gadgets to class, unfortunately schools aren't always very helpful when it comes to setting up devices.
![Each year more and more children require high-tech gadgets for class, but we don't do enough to teach the parents.](/web/20170131224523im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/y/0/0/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu2f8x.png/1485899027510.jpg)
My daughter starts Grade 5 this week and needs an iPad in class – let's call her Venus, the codename we used at home when she was young and we didn't want her to know we were talking about her. Venus has an older brother Mars, who starts Year 8 this week and is required to bring a Windows notebook to class.
Personally I don't think kids need their own devices in primary school, such things can wait until high school, but that's the way our primary school has decided to go. The school has actually been pretty good when it comes to running iPad information nights for parents and sending home details about what's required for class, but I think it could do more to help non-tech savvy parents manage devices – especially when it comes to security and data backups.
Onboarding
Thankfully I went through this when Mars was at primary school, so the process of setting up Venus' iPad was pretty straight forward and she went through a family tech onboarding, a bit like when you report to HR on the first day of a new job.
The first step was to set her up with a Gmail account, we're a Google-centric household so with her own Gmail account it's easy to bring Venus into the family ecosystem such as granting her access to our Google Play Music Family plan. It's also a handy way to share calendars.
From here I used the Gmail account to create an iTunes account, but Venus doesn't know the password to either account. The iPad is set to insist that I enter the password before she can download new apps, and as an extra security precaution there isn't a credit card attached to her iTunes account – instead I either use iTunes cards or "gift" her small amounts from my iTunes account.
Of course Venus is only 10 years old and the Terms and Conditions of both services insist that account holders must be at least 13. You might share your own iTunes account with your child, but I find that gets a bit messy so I simply lie about their age. Some apps like Lumosity lock you out if you admit you're underage, the workaround is to simply delete and reinstall the app.
Backup
As soon as your children start storing school work on their own devices you need to think about backups, as the teacher is unlikely to accept "the dog deleted my homework" as an excuse for handing in assignments late.
Apple offers 5GB of free online storage as part of an iCloud account, but kids chew through that pretty quickly when they start taking photos and videos on their iPad. What's especially frustrating is that as soon as iCloud detects that your next backup will be larger than 5GB it simply stops backing up, it doesn't even upload new versions of documents that are already in the cloud.
If you don't want to pay Apple for more cloud storage there are several other options, but in the end I decided the easiest option was to disable Photo Library backup in the iCloud/ Manage Storage/ Venus' iPad/ Backup Options menu. Instead we use an iPad app called PhotoSync to copy the Camera Roll to our home Network Attached Storage drive via FTP. I created Venus a limited user account on the NAS, where I can run apps to backup her files to the cloud.
I've done something similar on Mars' Windows notebook, using Handy Backup to automatically copy all his school work to our NAS each day.
I've had trouble setting up cloud backups using Microsoft's OneDrive due to the frustrating way the school has locked down his notebook – even though we purchased it outright through the school's deal with a major retailer. The high school has really dropped the ball when it comes to assisting parents with managing devices. Out of the box it couldn't connect to the internet at home, only at school, until I changed the proxy settings – a problem likely to confound less-tech savvy parents.
Security
While their school work is safely backed up should disaster strike, I also want to keep my children safe from the seedy side of the internet.
Rather than installing filtering software on individual devices, I've changed the DNS settings on our home router to use Norton ConnectSafe. This stops my children looking at inappropriate content while connected to the home Wi-Fi network, plus it blocks some malicious sites. The school's filtering kicks in when they connect to the school network, but there's no protection in place if they're using the internet elsewhere.
Unfortunately you can't always change the DNS settings in your home router, especially if you're stuck with a Telstra-issued gateway like the one that came with my Telstra cable connection. For me the solution was to switch the Telstra gateway to Bridge mode, so it only acts as a modem, and let my FritzBox 7490 run the home network.
To be honest it's not too difficult to bypass this kind of filtering if you know what you're doing, this is simply intended to stop young children accidentally stumbling across inappropriate content. It's much more difficult to thwart older children who are actively looking for it, at this point it becomes a matter of trust and parental supervision rather than simply a technological challenge.
Once your children have their own devices there are plenty of other family tech challenges to tackle, from sharing digital content to dealing with the household bandwidth hog. How do you manage the tech in your home?
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