Gadgetory

hey and Donnell bail for cnet.com and I'm also the parent of a child who loves the iPad we have one iPad in our house and it's loaded up with all kinds of fun and hopefully educational apps for him but it's also loaded up with my Facebook account my email and all kinds of stuff I don't want him messing with now Apple is kind enough to include some parental restrictions on the iPad under the general settings so that I can lock out some features and limit the damage my cake can do to my credit card and my reputation those are great tools but when you really want some peace of mind there's guided access totally separate from the parental controls you'll find guided access by going to Settings General accessibility and then scroll down to guided access I still see in the description and navy and guided access allows you to temporarily lock down the iPad to just one single app the home button gets disabled there's no multitasking your kid is limited just to the app that you choose for them to get started flip the switch and tap set passcode to create a four-digit passcode ideally one that your kids not going to be able to guess next find the app you want your kid to use launch it and then once it's up and running quickly tap the home button three times now this is where it gets kind of cool before iOS locks down the app they also give you a chance to mark out any areas on the screen that you want to disable maybe it's an in-app purchase button or a settings menu you just circle it and make any adjustments you also have an options button down here at the bottom which gives you a separate menu for disabling sleep-wake buttons or volume buttons the touch control and motion control by default sleep and volume are disabled but touch and motion are left on works fine for me but if you want to put an episode of Barney in front of your toddler without them going to town on the playback controls disabling touch might be the way to go so when you're ready to lock the app in press the start button at the top right and if you disabled any areas on the screen you'll find that those areas are grayed out now you'll notice that if you hit the home button you'll just see a little banner reminding you that you're in guided access mode at this point you can hand this thing over to your kid who will probably groan about being stuck with a phonics app now when it's time to pry the iPad away and put it back to normal all you have to do is triple click the home button again enter that four digit password that you created and you're free again to use the iPad however you wish or if your kid is ace their phonics and you want to treat them to a little game time just open up a new app triple click and turn that guided access on again so there you go that's how to take any iOS device and temporarily lock it down to a single app for more how-to like this head over to how-to cnet.com i'm donald bell for CNET giving kids everywhere a new reason to hate their parents