Purchasing Tablets for Schools

[gerryh]

Hello,

 

We are looking for tablets to be able to do the following:

 

• Ability to store and read books for group guided reading
  
• Provide support to students who are visually impaired
  
• Have applications for SEN students to help with their motor skills.
  

 

Have any schools already tablets and can anyone recommend a tablet for these tasks?

 

We have been recommended that the Kindle HD Fire would be good for this but I'm not sure?

[Steve21]

As with all tablet purchases (at least in my opinion) best option would be look for the applications you want, and then work out what tablets they work on. Are there any you've found that you like so far?

 

There's no point to buying "insert tablet name" if you then can't find anything you want on them

 

Depending on how many you're going to be buying, also consider management of them. Manually loading a book onto a device once is ok, onto hundreds not so

 

Steve

[beany1]

Check with licensing - I'm assuming you want to purchase the books yourself for the children to read as opposed to the users buying there own?

Kindle books - limit to the amount of simultaneous openings - depends on the book Amazon told me most are 5 or 6 but you won't know till you buy the book!

Apple iBooks - strictly for non business/organisation use so 1 book per account and you can't fake gift it like you do with apps! (from Apple Education team)

Kobo books however apparently can be synced to as many devices and opened as much as you like on the same account - that's from Kobo support but they are pretty useless.

 

Also as Steve said check the apps - we looked at a lot of expensive SEN apps that were not a touch on windows applications for SEN.

 

I've found that locking down android tablets is a lot more difficult than iPads - seriously not in the Apple camp, but I will be suggesting against android tablets. Stuff like syncing apps, and basic lockdown is a lot easier than android - mainly due to android having more features that aren't there/blocked by apple. For example on IOS in app purchases that are not through the app store are blocked so to buy books on Kobo you need to go to the website and login - however Android doesn't block this so in the Kobo app you can directly purchase apps.

 

Hope some of this helps?!

[Sylv3r]

On the topic of books, this looks good and reasonably priced.... probably not for the RM haters!

 

https://www.rmbookshelf.com

[laserblazer]

Looking at this https://whispercast.amazon.com/?ref=kas_wc_2 it would seem that more than 5 users can share the same document. It can also set up proxies and control internet access. I've emailed Amazon for clarification on the multi-user bit.

[adamsmith37]

gerryh,

 

Not for sure if you would be interested, but we have just launched our new KENNA Tablet by TeacherTube. Go to KENNA Tablet by TeacherTube - An Educational Tablet for Schools or email me at [email protected] for more information. Would love to work with you in making your decision.

 

Thanks,

-Adam