Having access to your kids and their data, in the name of ‘educational advantage’, is big business these days. As we wrote about recently, there is now a national database with the personal data of all k-12 children in some states, and children from select districts in others, and companies are being allowed to mine that data. Now meet the Amplify Tablet. The Amplify Tablet is the product of News Corp., and their educational division.
The Amplify tablet has a 10 inch display, and Android under the hood. Now, we haven’t had our hands on this tablet, but we’re here to tell you that we know 12-year-olds who can hack an Android tablet – with full parental controls on it – in under ten minutes. So, right off the bat, we wonder just how child-safe this tablet is.
But, explains Amplify CEO Joel Klein, schools need “a tablet designed specifically for the education space.”
According to Laurence Holt, Chief Product Officer for Amplify, schools’ failure to keep up with consumer and business technologies is “inexplicable, inexcusable and unacceptable.”
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The Amplify tablet itself sells for $299 with just wifi, and $349 with wifi + 4G, and comes preloaded with all sorts of Amplify-proprietary education software. And, oh yes, a two-year contract.
That’s right, attached to the tablet is a required two-year contract. Even if you have the wifi-only version.
Of course, News Corp./Amplify expect to sell these to schools, not individuals, so that’s good. Because parents won’t have to pay for them. Because we’re sure that private schools won’t raise tuition to cover the tablets, and we’re equally sure that public schools will be able to budget for these without raising taxes. (Cupcakes, anyone?)
We particularly like this quote from a news source:
“Since not all students can afford Wi-Fi in the home, schools could purchase the Amplify Tablet Plus, which comes with 4G LTE connectivity.”
We’re also sure that this is exactly what our failing education system needs to have our children suddenly start learning how to read, write, and do arithmatic again.
Curiously, for wont of a better word, they have made it very difficult to get to the information about their privacy policies and terms of use – things which most parents would be concerned about when a company is putting Internet-connecting tablets in the hands of their children.
The links to their privacy policies, terms of use, and contact information are at the bottom of their site, which in and of itself is pretty standard these days. What isn’t so standard is that, much like the never-ending Facebook scroll through a timeline, their blog posts are on their home page – all of them, and so you have to scroll with the patience of Job to get to the end and find the privacy policies, terms of use, and contact links buried at the bottom.
So, to make it easy on you, here are the links:
[Page no longer available – we have linked to the archive.org version instead]
[Page no longer available – we have linked to the archive.org version instead]
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