

Ask HN: Should we keep building this cloud managed tablet for the classroom? - ricksta

We had this vision of a turn-key tablet solution for K-12 educators. We are forking Android to add cloud device management for the teachers to install/remove apps from students device, restrict when students are allowed to play games, and what website students can access. It will also have a school friendly app store that allows the school to purchase app and ebook licenses for all their devices, and push app installs to all of their tablets through the cloud.<p>After doing some research, some schools who rolled out tablets to their students allowed their students to manage their own devices. They decided to educate the students on whats appropriate rather than restricting their tablets.<p>Now we are not sure if we are solving the right problem any want to manage their students' tablets. HN, what do you think?
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kernel_sanders
We must work in similar industries. We had, and scrapped, a project do to
nearly exactly what you are describing. It felt like this was the next logical
step for us: we had experience in hardware, embedded linux, android and have
good relationship with prominent distributors.

However, it was still a big big task and we'd never get close to competing on
price/quality. Also, we discovered the same thing when talking with schools,
they were letting students manage their own and adopting new policies to
regulate their use.

We're focusing on software now.

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sonabinu
This maybe appropriate for middle school and younger kids. As kids go to high
school they should be capable of making responsible decisions and not have
'big brother' monitoring them.

