The shift from traditional textbooks to e-books and tablets continues to pick up speed in American schools, Yahoo News reports. Districts are becoming increasingly enamored with the new medium which they say not only allow quick updates and more interactive learning, but also brings down the costs of academic materials per-student.

The former New York City school chief Joel Klein is one such technology evangelist, saying that digital tools revolutionize the way students learn. Introducing tablets instead of textbooks allows teachers to personalize learning to the individual needs of their students, as opposed to sticking to a one-size-fits-all solution offered by traditional texts.

Klein is not a disinterested party in this debate. Since leaving his post in NYC, he’s joined the educational efforts of the company NewsCorp, which recently announced a launch of its own tablet Amplify that will come complete with a suite of software published by the company’s education arm.

News Corp. introduced their Amplify tablet during a breakfast Wednesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Priced at $299, the 10-inch unit runs on a school’s wireless Internet system and comes with software for teachers to watch each student’s activities, offer instant polls and provide anonymous quizzes to gauge student understanding.
Orders placed by June 30 will be ready for the start of the school year in the fall, officials at Rupert Murdoch’s company said, adding yet another platform for schools to consider.

Merely a decade ago, a tablet for every student might have seemed like an unrealizable dream – but that was before the dramatic price drops that brought such technology within the means of many school districts. Google, which sells a stripped down notebook running its Chrome operating system priced at only $199 per unit, has already formed partnerships with several localities that put the Chromebook in the hands of more than 20 million students.

The more advanced the courses, the more likely is technology to play a part in them. According to a Pew Research Trust study, 40% of AP classes and National Writing Project classrooms use tablets, smartphones or laptop computers regularly in during instruction.

In coming years, growth seems to be the norm. Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, has suggested replacing textbooks — they cost the city $100 million a year — with tablets. Schools in Los Angeles last month allocated $50 million to start buying tablets for every student; the project is expected to cost $500 million by the time it is completed. Schools in McAllen, Texas, distributed 6,800 Apple tablets last year at a cost of $20.5 million.

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After teasing it at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, NewsCorp is now releasing their new tablet Amplify which will be a centerpiece of the company’s push into digital education publishing, GigaOM reports. The tablet will debut during a panel at the technology conference SXSWedu which kicked off this Monday in Austin, Texas.

The tablet comes as a result of work done by Wireless Generation, a company acquired by NewsCorp in 2010, and will feature a 10 inch screen running the latest version of the Android operating system called Jelly Bean. It will come with a suite of apps created by NewsCorp as well as with preloaded content from education technology titans like Khan Academy and CK-12. It will also include the Desmos graphic calculator for free.

The goal for the tablet is to bring it into the classroom as quickly as possible and, according to GigaOM, it is optimized for use in an education environment.

“Simply giving kids hardware or another computer, I think, is not going to change what’s going on,” Joel Klein, Amplify’s CEO and the former New York City Schools Chancellor told reporters on a press call. “That’s why we focused instead on creating a rich, robust learning platform for the school space.”

Amplify’s tablet, which comes ready for student use out of the box, lets administrators and teachers distribute content across an entire class or grade level, allows teachers to control the content on students’ screens and gives students different digital ways participate in class. To enable those features, the company said, it couldn’t just run its software on any device, it needed to get deeper into the operating system.

Teachers will be able to use the tablet’s software to monitor students’ progress through their schoolwork and will have complete control over the tablet operation of each student, up to and including blocking it from the internet or shutting down a particular app. Amplify also comes with a tool for two-way communication between students and teachers such as quick surveys and reports on kids’ progress generated on the fly.

Since the tablet utilizes Google’s popular mobile operating system, it will also have access to some apps sold on the app store Google Play.

Although the product doesn’t launch with analytics dashboards for teachers, over time apps running on the tablet could give teachers and schools a clearer picture of achievement at the individual and broader levels, the company said. Using various apps and services, schools could enable teachers and students to do some of what Amplify’s tablet can do on regular iPads and Android devices – classroom clickers and startup ClassDojo, for example, provide classroom management tools, social education startup Edmodoprovides a platform for sharing content and collaboration and Pearson  and McGraw-Hill Educationoffer digital textbooks that aim to personalize learning.

The tablet is priced competitively to make it attractive to cash-strapped schools and school districts. The basic model , which comes with WiFi built in, but doesn’t have cellular access, will be priced at $299. The Amplify Plus will cost an additional $50 but will have 4G build in and will include 2 years of mobile internet valued at $179 per year.

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Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and current executive vice president at News Corp, has announced ambitious expansion plans for “Amplify,” the company’s education division. Klein, who also heads Amplify, sees the division becoming aggressive in the sector by releasing products meant to appeal to the current crop of students and their insatiable hunger for everything tech-related.

Over the course of a presentation made during the UBS Global Media and Communication Conference, Klein outlined plans to release an open-source tablet that will run the company’s optimized educational software. The included applications will not only be Common Core Standards-compliant, but will also include an extensive analytics component that will aid teachers, schools and districts in feeding increasingly popular and extremely data hungry academic assessment systems.

Klein’s point is that U.S. K-12 education is a “broken model,” with shockingly low graduation rates, “we spend a lot on education and do not see the results.” To change all this, Klein said, “the private sector’ has to be involved and that “technology will forever change how we teach students.” Klein said, “kids use media and technology of all kinds but they’re told they have to turn them all off when they get to school.”

According to estimates unveiled during the presentation, Klein views the education market as lucrative, with over $700 billion up for grabs. Seventeen billion of that is available in the K-12 market in which Amplify expects to compete most aggressively.

To take a chunk of that market, the division is prepared to invest heavily in development. So far, the costs of the product design is pushing $180 million – a large number considering that the unit is reporting about $100 million in yearly revenues. Amplify has already contracted to provide its software and hardware services to over 200 school districts around the country.

Amplify is focused on changing American education with a program focused on Amplify Insight, teaching software tied to a prototype Amplify tablet device designed to collect and mine “big data,” in other words, use data analysis to drive teaching. He also pointed to Amplify Learning, customizable “gamefied” educational content—the digital textbook in a new form—tied to national core curriculum standards and designed to appeal to young people’s love of digital technology and multimedia.

Klein hopes that products sold by Amplify will not just transform the way kids are taught, but will completely overthrow the current 9-3 school day paradigm. When academic materials are available around the clock online, and instructors are easily reachable via forums, social media and email, learning doesn’t need to stop when kids leave the class or even the school building.

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