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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

My kids school district got iPads for all the students. Then they selected a math textbook that didn't work on the iPad.

I'm pretty convinced that the motivations for providing iPads or laptops for each student are almost entirely political and not educational.

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Our child has one website that uses flash. I've removed flash from all our other computers except the one computer locked down to use just that.

How a school, and vendor, get away with requiring flash in 2017 is beyond frustrating.

School's online systems tend to be woefully behind the times. Usually online portals and e-textbooks are little more than patronizing nods to the students that have come to accept tech in their lives as a necessity rather than any meaningful attempt at bettering education.

Pearson textbook publisher requires Flash for my kids. So they have Chromebooks for most things, and school-issued laptops for online textbooks.

This madness must stop, but field-tested textbooks are a lot of work. And a lot of $$. Good luck.

How would any book "not work on the iPad"? It seems like whatever math is taught in the book can be done on the iPad (either writing out the problems in a drawing app or using a special purpose one).

Was it some kind of ebook? Is that what you mean?

Correct. It was an online textbook and it didn't work in Safari.

Yikes.

I despise Safari. If they just used Chromium, instead waiting years to merge in the improvements, my job would be so much less frustrating.

I have OSX in a VM just for Safari issues.

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