Leading media company News Corporation surprised many at the recent South by Southwest interactive festival in Austin, TX when it announced that its education division Amplify will offer an Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet, to K-12 schoolchildren.
The tablet for classroom use will come equipped with a user interface designed especially for teachers and students, along with educational content and software. Information Week wrote: “The tablet’s home screen includes a sidebar of “notebooks” in which students can track their work, assignments and deadlines for their courses. The teacher version has controls for pushing content to the students, directing them to a specific page of an electronic textbook, and selectively locking down student tablets so they can access only certain apps or reference materials while taking a quiz, for example.”
We think it sounds like a good business idea for News Corporation, and a beneficial way to ramp up the digital classroom. For several years, CCS Presentation Systems has been seeing the rapid digitization of the K12 classroom, with projectors, SMART boards and other audio-visual solutions being introduced. Purchasing tablets for the students seems like a logical next step.
What do you think? Leave us a note in the comments.
