tablets

Districts are trading print for digital textbooks, with 22 states making significant digital content policy changes in recent years—altering the definition of a textbook and encouraging flexible funding, says Geoff Fletcher, deputy executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association.

Autrey Mill Middle School in suburban Atlanta is part of a pilot project launched this spring by Amplify, News Corp.’s education technology company, which has tablets in the hands of about 2,500 students at 12 schools across the country.

Exploring four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, and examining how teachers can take students on a journey from consumption of media to curation, creation, and connection.

District 158 in Algonquin, Ill. will be putting more tablets in students’ hands after recently revealing plans to expand its digital curriculum program to early elementary and middle school classrooms. The school district’s “one-to-one” digital curriculum replaces traditional textbooks and allows students to access online programs and lessons through their own tablet, provided by the district.

Spurred on by South Dakota’s pending move to online tests, the Sioux Falls School District plans to spend $7.3 million during the next two years buying Google Chromebooks or Apple iPads for every student, from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Deerfield Public Schools have pulled the trigger on the first big computer buy in over two and a half years, allotting $327,000 for Google Chromebooks, Nexus 7 Tablets and support equipment for web-based learning.

In the move to 1:1 computing, school district leaders are increasingly looking for alternatives to traditional PCs and laptops, and for many districts, the go-to device is the iPad. But now, for a growing roster of Apple competitors, the time has come to give the iPad a run for its money.

A New York-based educational technology startup today released an Android-powered touchscreen tablet designed for kids both to take to school and bring home. For sale only to schools for now, the Amplify tablet comes pre-loaded with virtually everything a student will encounter during the school day, including all the textbooks, lessons, tests and e-books she might be assigned, and gives teachers the ability to both monitor and control what students do with the device.