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NC School District Recalls Its Amplify Tablets After 10% Break In Under a Month
Nate the greatest writes "Guilford County Schools' headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There's currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.'s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."
Don't give them tablets.
go with the lowest bidder. If you're going to make notebooks for school, make them so they can withstand those things found in schools -- students.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This is news, how exactly?
Raise your hand if you know that teenagers tend to break shit. A lot. Move along, nothing to see here.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't care if they are iPads or Android tablets or whatever. They aren't ready for public schools to waste their money on them.
They probably shouldn't have incorporated the tablets into the wood shop curriculum - if a student doesn't have a hammer available, he's gonna use the first thing he can lay his hands on.
Fortunately, back in my day, that just meant occasionally driving nails with a crescent wrench.
#DeleteChrome
"listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them"
But they were listed in the contract. Presumably the school didn't check the CPU either. So what?
Half-a-dozen years ago when my daughter was in high school, the district piloted a "laptop progam" where all the books and assignments were done electronically. They had some deal with Microsoft and Dell with "deals" on MS Office Student and some Dell laptops.
I threw a fit and insisted we would NOT be purchasing the "required" laptops and would provide one for our daughter. The school relented because I made such a pain of myself.
Off to E-Bay I went and purchased an older, used Panasonic Toughbook. Not the latest, but ran all the software and rugged enough to stop small caliber weapons fire.
The breakage rate of those cheap, plastic Dell laptops was horrific. High schoolers casually tossed them on desks or in their locker or bookbags, resulting in over 90% of them getting returned for repair by the end of the year.
We ended up selling the Toughbook to a student entering the program in the next year. It had held up fine.
Computers given to students need to be mil-spec ruggedized if you want them to remain usable for any period of time.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This comes as no surprise to those of us that work for public schools (including me, staying safely anonymous). What is a surprise is the lack of negative news for iPad roll-outs. The latest one in my county was to a tiny public school in the country of 500 students. They were given iPads a week before school started. On opening day there was a dozen broken sent in plastic bags to my office with a 'Pls repair ASAP! Thx' post-it note applied. After a month the pile had risen to 50. We expect to go into Christmas break with over a hundred broken.
Of course we will not be canceling the program. The way that the Apple contracts are set up with the administration means that the parents have to reimburse the school district $1000 for a totaled device, $400 for a screen, and $100 for anything else. No opt out, as our textbooks are all digital now. It is considered a self-funding project, IT costs included.
I apologize for the rant. It is just this tablet craze is more of a detriment, nomatter the manufacturer.
Unfortunately, this mirrors my own experience when I bought all the kids on my street laptops on the condition that they spend weeks with me learning how to handle and respect them. One year later, every single laptop was inoperable. Of course, every one of these kids owned an iPod touch... with a broken screen, so there were warning signs.
I think the problem is the portability of these devices. The reason I didn't break my Commodore 64 when I was a kid is because it sat on a desk. If it was portable, I probably would have shattered or lost it at some point too. I don't think we can make these devices rugged enough to survive your average teenager.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
How much do you want to bet that no one in the school district will be held accountable for the inept management of this program?
Anecdotally: I did IT for my school district between graduating high school and going to university and I can attest that the administrators were completely clueless about technology. Their job was to sign contracts, so they would go out to lunch/dinner with some sales guy who would promise the sky and then when it failed they would move on to the next vendor who would promise to make all the problems better.
Examples: Entire classroom logs onto machines (30+), of course roaming profile is turned on so everything has to propagate. 30 machines into one switch, one connection from that switch to some other switch that has one connection to the server. No backbone, no QOS, and it never occurred that they didn't need the stupid roaming profile enabled.
So of course all the teachers complained everything was slow. The Admins, not understanding networking and what a bottleneck is (except the ones they had at lunch) threw out all the completely functional machines and bought new top of the line shit from Dell. Problem still not solved, so they got some network vendor to come in and check it out. Result: the school installed fiber to EVERYWHERE. Every classroom had fibre run to it so the stupid roaming profile could propagate. Now there was nothing going on in this school that required the hardware and bandwidth that they had, the most computer centric class was keyboarding. (poverty stricken school district is another issue).
I guess I'm cynical but I hold most school district administrators in contempt. They have no adult supervision, the head IT guy is usually some ex teacher with a information systems cert. You as a vendor, could walk into the room and say "your johnson rod is miscalibrated, it will cost $10,000 to calibrate and all the problems will go away" and they will all say "Yep thats what I suspected, cut this man a check. And they will tell the Superintendent they fixed all the computer problems. No independent oversight, no audit.
Didn't some school district recently find out it bought tens of thousands of dollars of extra equipment from HP or Cisco because no one in the district could tell a IP switch from a railroad switch?
I was wrong it was the state goverment
Well, a high school student in Guilford County, I thought this program would fail from the very beginning. I go to a private school that issues laptops to students starting in 6th grade (except WE buy them and own them individually, not, say, the state) and continuing through 12th grade. Students at my school break their laptops all the time--screens crack, keys pop out, power cords explode, etc. Most damages are covered by the laptops' warranties. We took classes for a year on properly maintaining electronics and we STILL end up with cases of powderized hard drives every year. It was hard for me to believe that MY state would pay such huge sums of money for thousands of dubiously-effective devices that are known to shatter when dropped. There's no way not to sound like a snob saying this, but I can't see many public school students being particularly careful with these tablets. The students at my school took classes in handling our laptops, paid for them with our own money, and STILL pay out the ass fixing the things every year because so many of them do not respect computers. I haven't read the literature on tablets in education, but I didn't think this was a cost-effective program and I predicted that 50% of the tablets would be MIA or KIA by the end of the first school year. I'm glad I won't get to a chance to prove myself right, but it's a shame that nobody at any point in the process of rolling out these tablets questioned the feasibility of it all.
Studies have shown no increase in math and reading scores with the adoption of high technology - use of tables or laptops. The moral of the story being there's no magic bullet to replace old fashion reading, writing and arithmetic. Just because it's sexy, doesn't mean you need to spend the money.
> but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them
This is a $3,000,000.00 contract and no one thought to check the product specs against the contract specs. Heads need to roll, and certainly would where I work. And, yes I work for a government agency.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
>> That's less than 13 cents each. What kind of quality did they expect??
> $200.00 / 15000 ~= 0.0133 cents each
He's still technically correct, and that's the best kind of correct. Your example would be $0.0133 each. I'm heading back to cartoons now.
Pull my finger for my public key.
Our school switched this term to iPads for all students. My old-school technique of placing sticky tabs on the pages to discuss no longer works. Yet somehow, I'm managing to use the highlights and notes features of the textbook app to still teach the class. And somehow, my students are managing to do their required reading, and turn in their homework on time.
I don't understand how any of this can happen if a tablet can't replace a textbook. Perhaps you have some reason that it's not working that I'm simply unaware of? Is there some critical function of textbooks I'm missing? I certainly haven't tried fully replacing all the normal functions of textbooks with iPads yet, such as doorstops, anchors, body-building equipment, or fly swatters. But as far as learning tools go, they seem to be working for us.
John
Schools don't have money, school districts have money. The per-student in-class spending on students is very low in the US, but the per-student education "costs" in the US are among the highest in the world. We pay administrators, management, testing organizations, textbook deals, and all that at premium prices, but teacher pay and conditions aren't that good.
So this is logical (even if horribly broken). The district bought them, not the schools, even if they "gave" them to only one school as a pilot. At my school (a public school that has been on the list of the best in the country), the teachers volunteered for most after school activities. Only sports were sponsored. So academic contests were often held under the banner of UIL, the same organization that handles sports in Texas. So the math contests were "sports" on paper. And yes, I got a High School Letter in "sports" because of my participation in math (and other) contests.
Learn to love Alaska
The weight of books is an issue. About 10% of the students in my school had weight-related issues diagnosed (scoliosis in girls was common). I didn't find out until later that wearing a backpack one-strapped would lead to deformity (I had a doctor raise it as an issue when I broke a shoulder in a sporting accident). I couldn't be "fixed" because I was asymmetrical to begin with. When my kids get to school age, that's a fight I'm willing to fight. They shouldn't be forced to carry 20% of their body weight around on their backs regularly. An electronic device makes much more sense.
Learn to love Alaska
Bingo. Comparing the breakage rate for tablets that have been handed out to middle schoolers to that for tablets which have been bought by (and presumably used mostly by) adults is meaningless.
That said, if the contract stipulated that they were supposed to have Gorilla Glass screens and they didn't come so equipped, then that's fraud. If fraud is proven, then hopefully this results in some hefty financial penalties and/or jail time for those responsible.
You get what you pay for.
Buy some shitty cheap OEM android tablet where 1 in 10 breaks in the hands of children, you got what you paid for.
The only joke about this is it costs a minimum $600 because of a subscription based pricing structure. So $50 spent on the actual tablet hardware and $550 spent on bullshit.
Not saying that iPad's are the solution, but you think a company set up to provide devices for the K - 12 age group might have invested a little more heavily in industrial design considering that children are not going to respect a device, especially if its handed to them for free.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Exactly where in my post did I claim it made teaching or learning any better or worse? I didn't. I don't know yet if the students will come out stupid or smart as a result of having iPads. All I know is that I taught them with a textbook last term, and I'm teaching them with an iPad this term, despite the claims that such a feat is impossible.
I didn't say iPads won't get broken, dropped, smashed, go for a swim, get run over, or get placed in the same backpack as a shotput (yes, that's happened to a student's cell phone.) And I didn't say they were cheaper or more expensive.
I have already seen two wrapped in self-funded Otter Boxes and Life-something-cases, because the student knew they were at risk of breaking them. And I do know the price of e-textbooks is considerably cheaper than the price of dead-tree textbooks, and I believe that if half the students can manage to avoid breaking their Precious over the life of about six classes, the savings over paper books will place them at the breakeven point. Every e-textbook used after that will save money, even if the tablet has to be replaced again.
Textbooks are psychotically expensive. That's the primary reason the schools are turning to tablets.
John