Amplify: News Corp. subsidiary putting 15k tablets in North Carolina schools

More than 650 people work for Amplify, the News Corp. edtech subsidiary launched this year to make good on the attention and money being paid to tablets and gaming in schools.

Now, after much growth, the edtech digital learning tools company has its largest sale yet, to a school district in North Carolina. More than 15,000 tablets will be leased to the schools at a cost of about $199 each. The tablets will cost the district about $3.2 million in the first year and come with insurance against theft and damage. Amplify launched about a year ago and former New York City school chancellor, Joel Klein, runs the organization.

The company has three divisions:

• Insight — Its data division. The one leading to the most concerned speculation.
• Access — Its technology division, building the tablet and looking for ways to make educational technology affordable.
• Leaning — Its curriculum division, building the components of the system that deliver educational value to the classroom — mostly, it seems, in the form of games.

The company just created among the first high school-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs, which is sorta like MMPORG), giving students in school districts without an AP Computer Science class a chance to take the class and study for its AP Test.  The company released a complete list of all the educational games it has created or commissioned this past June.

In a promotional video highlighting some of their games, the narrator describes the first game shown, saying it is “as awesome as the best games on the market.” Technically Brooklyn suspects the narrator hasn’t played Borderlands 2.  That said, the games do look much more engaging than a spelling textbook.

http://youtu.be/SPG-6F19ETU