News Corp’s Education Tablet May Be The Bureaucratic Fit Schools Need To Adopt Tech

Public school systems are cheerfully decorated dictatorships: discipline, standards, and testing are the driving concepts of modern k-12 education. The very reason why districts purchase bundles of the same textbooks is so they can keep classrooms in lockstep alignment as teachers meticulous meet timely instructional goals. 

Amplify, NewsCorp’s new education division, finally revealed its long-awaited flagship product: a sophisticated tablet designed specifically for schools, which many finally be the perfect bureaucratic blend of classroom management, assessment, and monitoring that schools need to adopt technology en mass.

But what in the sam hill is News Corp. doing messing around in education? Well, it’s true that Rupert Murdoch is one of the more well-known (and polarizing) figures in the media landscape; his reputation precedes him, and it’s not one that’s typically been associated with education reform. While the News Corp. 

founder’s sudden transformation into an education reform advocate may seem a head-scratcher, the motivation becomes clear when, in Murdoch’s terms, one considers that K-12 education is a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone — and one that remains relatively untouched by corporations like News Corp.

A little over two years ago, Murdoch set out leverage the News Corp. brand to help fix a public education system that, in his words, has “lower standards than American Idol,” hiring one of the more prominent figures in American education, former chancellor of New York schools, Joel Klein, to pursue opportunities in EdTech. With Klein as his new education guru, the pair quickly made their first big strategic move, acquiring New York-based software, assessment and data services startup, Wireless Generation, for a whopping $360 million.

However, News Corp.’s plans for education were quickly derailed by the infamous phone-hacking scandal that forced Klein leave his position to lead the company’s internal investigation. After two years of investigations, trials and more, News Corp. rebranded its education unit last summer as “Amplify,” revealing some of the basic tenets that would shape its digital strategy, which include “assessment via mobile tools, curriculum design and the online distribution of resources via AT&T-powered tablets,” as Greg wrote at the time.

Klein and company are convinced that, for public education reform to be successful, the private sector needs to get more involved — as does the role of technology in the classroom to help both teachers teach more effectively and help students learn. Amplify attempts to put those ideas into practice, by allowing the company to not only sell its curriculum on any tablet makes its way into schools, but by betting that schools will be willing to fork over a pretty penny to access blended learning tools (and an infrastructure to store learning data) all through a custom tablet.

Of course, Ammplify isn’t the first to offer these types of learning tools on mobile devices, as many startups (and even bigs like Pearson) already have similar cross-platform, web-based tools on the market. However, no particular device or platform has emerged as the clear leader, and by offering classroom management tools and features that one would expect from News Corp, like a kill switch that allows teachers to limit students’ access to apps on the tablet, Amplify hopes to get a leg up.

Source: Engadget


Amplify aims to be not just a tool but a platform for managing a 21st century classroom. Where past efforts to incorporate tablets into a K-12 environment have been satisfied with simple (and carefully controlled) social features and some reference materials, this actually offers features to teachers aimed at delivering instant feedback and differentiated instruction. Everything from taking attendance and blocking distracting apps, to polling students comprehension and pushing supplemental materials to those that need it can be managed from the educator's unit. There's also the ability to build custom lesson plans called Playlists, that can incorporate material from locally stored textbooks, pre-loaded Khan Academy videos and the internet.

The biggest stumbling block continues to be price. A WiFi-only Amplify Tablet will set schools back $299 apiece, so long as you agree to a two-year subscription to Amplify's services at $99 a year. (It's nice to see Klein has learned something from working closely with the carriers.) Prices climb even higher if schools wish to have LTE connectivity; an Amplify Tablet Plus will put a $349 dent in a school's budget and that's before factoring in the two-year mandatory subscription which includes AT&T service for $179 a year. Still, there's plenty of solid ideas at work here that we could see enjoying great success if they're incorporated into a more affordable product. For more, check out the video above as well as the PR below.