Android tablets in education/classroom

[dchawk82]

A little background first: I'm an elementary school teacher (small private K-8 school) and also president of our school technology program. The program is made of myself, our principal, and a few others that mainly work in IT for outside businesses. We're in charge of upgrading classroom computers and purchasing other technology based needs (projectors, doc. cameras, smartboards, etc.).

We definitely don't turn a blind eye towards technology, as you can see, we actually embrace and welcome it. But our newest obstacle has us a bit hesitant. Many school districts are starting to replace their textbooks with tablets and we're in the midst of researching this same thing. Right now, it looks like Ipads are by far the favorites with other districts. As a matter of fact, it's proven difficult to find very much information on schools that are using Android tablets. As a GNex and Nexus 7 user, I would hate for us to jump on the Apple bandwagon just because we can't find support for using Android. Have any users here had experience with Android tablets in a school setting? I would assume the normal things would apply, Android would be cheaper but Apple would have more apps. Resources and support would be of major importance to us since we don't technically have an IT staff in our school building. If any of you have any tips, links, or suggestions, please throw them my way.

Thanks!

 

[mikedt]

I'm an English teacher in China, although I'm British. I teach middle school and one-to-one. I've looked at the state of good quality professional educational software for Android, and to be totally frank it's extremely disappointing. To the extent that I've sometimes recommended that some of my more affluent one-to-one students buy Apple iOS devices for their studies. This is one-to-one private students, not in the classroom.

State education in China is still very much blackboard, chalk and paper textbooks.

 

[AJGoogle]

We use Android tablets in our classroom and have not been disappointed. It's true that the application pool is smaller than that of iPads, but there is still more than enough apps to choose from. More importantly, we saved a lot on cost. We used some of the money that we saved to purchase a Datamation Systems cart that simultaneously charges and secures all of the tablets from theft when they are not in use. This cart is essential for tablet management so having the money to spend on it was very important to us.

 

[zeus11]

There are plenty of educational Android apps that runs fine on tablets. I think problem is that the developers need to provide screenshots to prove they run fine on tablets, and apparently many developers haven't done that.