After complaints from North Carolina schools, Amplify ruggedizes its tablets

Amplify’s largest tablet client is Guilford County, N.C., which leased over 17,000 devices from Amplify with a $30 million federal grant in 2013.
Problems with the edtech company’s signature product, however, have knocked out a whole school year’s worth of service from the tablets, according to a story in Education Week. That said, the company has extended its contract for a year at no charge so the district would get a full four years of working tablets.
The district made changes, too, working harder to get teachers ready for the devices. The biggest change Amplify made, according to the story, was switching manufacturers in a bid to make the tablets more rugged:

In November, Guilford County completed the deployment to 28 schools of nearly 18,000 devices from New York City-based Amplify, mostly without incident. So far, breakage and defect rates on the devices, much higher than anticipated during last school year’s deployment effort, are down dramatically, the result of Amplify switching manufacturers and placing a new emphasis on the “ruggedness” of their device.
As a result, Britt said, the district’s focus is now, finally, on changing classroom instruction.
Guilford County remains Amplify’s largest tablet client, using more than half of the devices the company has in circulation in U.S. K-12 schools.

Amplify is the largest tech company in Brooklyn, according to a Technical.ly survey last year.
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