Heard from a source familiar to the project that St. Paul College in Pasig is in the process of acquiring 5,000 units of Android tablets for its students which will replace most of the textbooks.
Apparently, the tablet project will eventually replace the books being used by the school for its students. The transition will happen in the next school year.
Several suppliers were invited for the bidding — Apple, RedFox, Archos, Acer and Toshiba, among others. St. Paul has some requirements in the hardware, operating system (Android 2.2 Froyo) and of course pricing.
It’s a relatively huge project, considering it’s for 5,000 units. I am told this is just an initial roll-out which will probably be for high-school students of the Pasig branch for the meantime. The cost of the tablets will be added into the tuition fees of the students. That should offset the cost of textbooks which goes for tens of thousands per year.
St. Paul will be doing some testing and development, which may include apps for research and other teaching tools the students can use. Of course, there’ll be provisions for security and parental control.
If the tablet will last for about 2 to 3 years, it might turn out cheaper than the actual books. Now that’s what I’d call one-tablet-per-student program!
Update: Have talked to several people who are familiar with the project. Turns out several other schools are doing something similar. St. Scholastica and de la Salle GreenHills are also looking into the tablet solution.
As for St. Paul’s initiatives, it seems that Jun Lozada is the man behind the idea (he’s the Technical Consultant of the nuns in those schools) and he’s very adamant about going for Android.
The IT of SPCP does very well at blocking things like Social Networking websites and the like when it comes to things like this, so no need to worry.
Also, most students travel by school service or private vehicles. Only a very small number of students commute in the High School department, so there’s a small chance of theft.
. . .The less load of books would also be very much appreciated by the students. Whew.