Friday, September 28, 2012

Reducing Distractions on your Student's iDevice


One concern administrators, teachers, and parents express when our team wants to assign a student an iTouch or an iPad, is how they will manage the built in distractions. Distractions like students surfing the web during class.  

If the iDevice is for a specific function such as tracking homework, following a schedule, or a aug comm device, this is easily fixable. The iDevices have a built in "Restrictions" utility that lets you remove different functions.  Let's get rid of some the unnecessary and distracting apps. 

Begin by clicking on the "Settings" icon. Then click on "General", and then click on "Restrictions".


You will be prompted to create a "Restrictions Passcode". Write it down somewhere if your not confident you will remember this! Otherwise the only way to override this is to restore the iDevice to the factory settings, thereby losing any materials you have on the device.

Also, if you have a tech person managing your iDevices, be so kind as to share that code with them too...




After entering your passcode twice, you will be presented with a page of options. We often turn off Safari, iTunes, as well as the ability to Install or Delete the apps. 

With some students turning off the ability to delete apps is really important! I cannot recount how many times a device has come back to us that has "mysteriously" lost a bunch of apps! 

When you go back to your "Home Page", you notice that the Safari and the iTunes icons are gone. 

Depending on the student goals, we may remove the FaceTime Camera as well. 

So there you go! Pretty easy to reduce unnecessary distractions for our iDevice using students!



Happy Therapy!

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