Dive Brief:
- Education Week recently checked in with North Carolina's Guilford County Schools to see how the second take of its Amplify tablet deployment is going, finding things in a much better state compared to the rocky initial deployment in 2013.
- The initial three-year, $16.8 million contract was suspended until the 2014-15 school year due to 1,500 broken screens and one melted charger.
- Today, there are 18,000 Amplify tablets in 28 of the county's schools.
Dive Insight:
Most interesting is that, while the district did decide to purchase the tablets, it rejected the option to purchase Amplify's English language arts middle school curriculum.
"We see [the device] as a way to break out of the mass production, one-size-fits-all model," Robin Britt, the district's director of instructional technology, told Ed Week. "We see it less as a curriculum tool and more as a student-independence tool."
