The Charlottesville School Board has OK’d a $2.4M expenditure to buy two thousand tablet computers for students, Graham Moomaw writes in the Progress. These Fujitsu Stylistics aren’t tablets in the iPad sense, assuming the Progress’ photo is representative, but really just laptops with the screen permanently affixed to the back of the computers, with a tethered pen-like stylus in lieu of a mouse, and a wireless keyboard. The operating system is simply a modified version of Windows 7, and not a real tablet operating system. Reviews of what I think are the right model aren’t glowing [1, 2], but presumably the school system’s requirements are rather different than most reviewers’. The laptops will cost $768 apiece, and will show up in a few weeks. CHS students will get them in mid-October, with kids at Buford and Walker getting them in November.
Note that this was originally pitched as a $500,000–$1,000,000 project back in February, a number that the school system was presenting as “below $1 million” in May.
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