Hard to believe that 10 years ago I was the nonconformist that insisted on using a laptop in class while everyone else was using a pen and paper. Several of the teachers had a real problem with it and were constantly giving me a hard time, and I had to constantly be aware of how much noise it was making- keeping my typing noise and cooling fan RPM to a minimum. Usually though I could plug it in for the majority of my classes since the battery life was only 3-4 hours.
Content filtering back then was based on a rather simple keyword auditing and blacklist system, which led to a constant cat and mouse game between users and sysadmins. Of course the entire system was laughably easy to bypass if you knew how, though I personally never found it worthwhile to do it some of my classmates did and would.
Just the idea that they would be providing hardware with the expectation that it would be used in my house would result in an immediate and unconditional no response. Even if I was allowed to modify the software of such a provided machine, hardware integrated surveillance has been demonstrated and used as well.
And like app103 describes, if I did end up with such a device anywhere near my privacy I would have the battery out of it the minute it came through the front door, stored in a separate compartment where it would not be installed again until it was returned to the school. They would have to be packing military grade hardware surveillance to beat that one.
