100,000 Win8 devices to Miami-Dade students

by SherlockTalent

I’m proud to share that the Miami Dade High School System has officially announced that they will be launching 100,000  HP and Lenovo Windows 8 devices for elementary school children along with some 7th and 9th grade students.  I have been involved with the school system since starting with Microsoft in the summer, and couldn’t be more proud to see them moving in this direction!  You can check out the article here

Thank you, James Quick, Microsoft

Original article

The Miami-Dade County school district announced Thursday that it will launch a 1-to-1 computing initiative this spring, providing Hewlett Packard and Lenovo Windows 8 devices to students throughout the 350,000-student school district.

This announcement comes after a 1-to-1 computing initiative was delayed last year due to concerns about similarly ambitious efforts around the country having run into problems, perhaps most notably in the Los Angeles school district, where a highly publicized technology rollout has faced a series of setbacks.

This digital transformation will put 100,000 HP and Lenovo Windows 8 devices in the hands of elementary school children, along with select 7^th and 9^th grade students.

In addition to the HP and Lenovo devices, the plan calls for 10,000 interactive boards to be added to classrooms in the district. Microsoft Corp. will provide Office 365 software for all district students to use along with Skydrive, a cloud-based storage system.

Microsoft will also provide technical support to ensure that the wireless devices run education applications properly.

“This is a long-term commitment,” said Margo Day, vice president of U.S. Education for Microsoft Corp., in an interview with Education Week. “We wanted to partner with Miami-Dade County because they have an instructional model that allows students to learn in a personalized way.”

In addition to Microsoft Office software being available to all students and instructors in the district at no cost, Miami-Dade county will begin using Bing for Schools, which is an ad-free, high-security web browser. All teachers will be enrolled in Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Network where they are provided with professional development to utilize the technology in their classrooms.

“We want to play a role in helping teachers bridge the learning gap,” said Day.

“Technology, by itself, is not going to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor, a gap that threatens so many of our minority students,” said Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho in a statement.  “But when technology is used correctly, we have seen powerful results.”

Miami-Dade County is the fourth largest school system  in the country. Houston and Madison, Wisc., have also made recent announcements about launching 1-to-1 computing initiatives in their school districts.

Cross-posted from the Digital Education blog

By guest blogger Danielle Wilson