Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a huge distraction in the classroom. Kids would be watching youtube videos, and worse, through the various proxy sites the school could never seem to block, all when they should have been paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised if performance dropped as a result.

That aside, I couldn't agree more with the issues in the report. There was no opt-out: no tablet meant no grades. You'd be a fool to expect any privacy. It was obvious school officials had some form of remote access: they could in theory lock the screen (this was easily circumvented by going offline), but to what degree, we couldn't be sure. For all I knew, they could have live access to the camera and microphone.

From this experience, it seems pretty clear that just throwing technology at students in hopes it helps them "learn" isn't going to work. The money wasted on this program could have been put to much better use, training teachers and actually buying books.