HacksTablets

Amazon Kindle, not safe for schools?

Kindle - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here

As most of you probably know, I work IT part time at a school. It’s been a lot of fun for me to see some of the larger scale uses of technology. Until I started there, the most computers I had to manage was 12. The day I started, that number jumped into the hundreds. This summer alone, we had 145 new laptops that we leased that had to be imaged and setup for teachers and students. Needless to say, I have been learning a ton.

We’ve got some cool new classroom technology coming in this year, but we also have some tried and true technology that we are buying. The school has purchased a bunch of Kindles in the hopes of replacing some aging paperback books in a couple of classrooms. The upfront cost is a little more to buy the Kindles, but it should save the school money in the long run. I’m pretty excited to see what we need to do to roll out all the Kindles and get them ready for the students. After we paid for them and heard they have been shipped, we were talking to the representative that sold them to us. We were told that the Kindles we were getting were of the ad-supported variety, which isn’t a huge deal, but then were told that some of the ads might not be safe for school children.

Not safe for children?

It was very frustrating to me to learn that this great tool for the classrooms might not even be safe for the classroom. I know that we could have paid more money to get the ad-free versions of the Kindles, but I didn’t think we would have to worry about the ads that will be displayed. I was dismayed for a couple of minutes until I did a Google search like any good hacker would to see if there was a way to remove the ads from the Kindles. Sure enough I found a couple sites claiming to know how to do just that, and it seemed pretty simple, as well. Now I’m excited to be getting the Kindles again, and having the opportunity to stick it to Amazon a little bit and remove the ads from the Kindles. I understand that the ads are the way Amazon can afford to sell the Kindles at a cheaper cost, but we just can’t take the risk of a bad ad popping up on one of them while in the hands of a kid. What do you think?

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Bryan Faulkner

Bryan Faulkner is a former associate editor at Pocketables. He loves to find new ways to use his tablets while working as the Tech Director at his local church. Mixing sound from the iPad is his newest obsession. He currently has a pair of HP TouchPads, an iPad 2, a decommissioned HTC EVO 4G, and a Samsung Galaxy Note II to tinker with.

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