NC School District Recalls Its Amplify Tablets After 10% Break In Under a Month 177
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 $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There's currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.'s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."
Obvious Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't give them tablets.
And this is what you get when you (Score:5, Insightful)
go with the lowest bidder. If you're going to make notebooks for school, make them so they can withstand those things found in schools -- students.
Er, lolwut? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is news, how exactly?
Raise your hand if you know that teenagers tend to break shit. A lot. Move along, nothing to see here.
Stop buying tables for schools. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if they are iPads or Android tablets or whatever. They aren't ready for public schools to waste their money on them.
Re:Stop buying tables for schools. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this is what you get when you (Score:4, Insightful)
go with the lowest bidder. If you're going to make notebooks for school, make them so they can withstand those things found in schools -- students.
200$ x 3 years doesn't smell a bit like a low bid. I'd go with something clam-shell, to be honest and you can drop from 20 feet and it still works without a cracked screen. Also needs to be waterproof, because kids will be carrying it about in backpacks which are 100% not waterproof.
Accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org]