Let me give you some insight. I'm an ICT Coordinator and I work alongside (sometimes) IT Technicians and Managers. The biggest drain on our broadband pipeline...yes...you guessed, FLASH apps. What do kids do/did? They actually went onto websites that have flash games. Now, they are all blocked. Why? Well, I went to the managers to find out why. I mean, the kids had a reward for doing their work and I let them play flash games for at least 5 minutes. So the explanation I received is that the games sucked up a lot of bandwidth, especially if a whole class of 28 kids accessed them.
Fair enough I said, and stopped the time out. So, as I pondered over the weekend and looked over some articles on why Apple decided to drop Flash from their iOS, and thinking that for education one of the complaints is that the iPad does not have the capacity to play flash video, games, etc. I thought, well if we have 28 or heaven forbid 56 iPads in a classroom, what will that do to our network and broadband usage? Yes, take up the whole lot in one go. So, do we actually want kids accessing lots of flash sites on their iPads? No! For our network Manager's sakes, the thought of having no flash would be tremendous, I would think. So, what is the Network Manager's nightmare? I'll have to dig around a little to find that answer. As far as I am aware, the fear of not being able to control accessibility is their worst nightmare.
The good?
1. No Flash
2. Only one or two app at a time use, if the teacher is attentive.
The bad?
1. Can't control internet usage?
2. Diminish network resources/traffic?
3. No Flash? Yay!
