Kevin BosticNews Corporation, parent company to Fox News, will enter the education sector this fall with not only a tablet-based curriculum but its own Amplify Tablet, aimed at taking on Apple's iPad in K-12 technology.
November will see Amplify, News Corp.'s nascent education division, rolling out both its own curriculum for existing tablets and a 10-inch, Android-powered tablet for K-12 students. A New York Times piece on the News Corp. tablet says the company will be selling it for between $299 and $349 per unit. Schools will also have the option of purchasing a $99 per year subscription to Amplify curriculum elements for each device.
Entering the education sector will put News Corp. at odds with Apple, a company News Corp. has collaborated with multiple times in the past, though not in the education market. From 99 cent TV show rentals to an ill-fated, iPad-only publication, News Corp. has often been among the first among major media corporations to put significant weight behind initiatives on Apple's devices. The company's Wall Street Journal publication is currently available on iOS' Newsstand app and will likely still be so when the Amplify Tablet launches later this year.
The rise of the tablet as the new face of personal computing has sparked a race among manufacturers to get their devices into the hands of students. Apple has been heavily pushing its industry-leading iPad as a replacement for PCs in education, and the company sold a million units to K-12 schools in one month last year.
Amplify's specs page for the device lists it as "similar to ASUS Transformer Pad TF300TL." It packs a 10-inch display, an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, and a 5MP auto-focus camera with back-illuminated CMOS sensor. It also runs the "latest Android Jelly Bean OS."
The Amplify Tablet is designed with "blended learning" in mind, a method "that mixes technology with old-fashioned teaching." Initially targeted at middle-school learners, Amplify designed the device so that school systems will be able to provide each student with an Amplify device to take home each night.
When the device launches later this year, Amplify's parent company News Corporation will have split into two separate publicly traded companies. Cable channels such as FX and Fox News, as well as 20th Century Fox and Fox Broadcasting, will come under the entertainment group. Amplify and its tablet will fall under the publishing division, along with newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and the publisher HarperCollins. The other arms of the publishing group are expected to lend content to Amplify's tablet. Rupert Murdoch will serve as chairman of both the entertainment and publishing divisions.
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105 Comments
Fox News providing content for your child's K-12 curriculum? Be scared, be very scared.
Oh thank god! Finally. from a company I can totally put my trust in. Fox news on the home page for the win!! I hope I can store my voicemails on this device. because I know they will be perfectly safe! (Ooh! and Bobby M. will be chairman of the whole project. Even better!! YAY!!)
The stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. I hope this thing epically, epically bombs, costing news corp as much money as possible.
Fox News tablets in education? Science books won't support text books teaching evolution or climate change. History books will be revised with their biased ultra-conserviative slants. Hopefully Comedy Central will also release a Daily Show/Colbert educational tablet to keep the Fox News tablet in line.
Based on previous threads, there is a 99.789 % chance that somebody (most likely a rabid liberal), is going to emerge from under their rock and make a snide comment about Fox News and the right, so I'm preemptively countering that straight away by stating that this tablet would suck equally as much had it been MSNBC that was behind it. All Android tablets suck, it doesn't matter who makes them or who is behind them.
Anybody can release their own Android tablets today. It takes no skill and little effort to do so. All you need to do is to turn to one of the countless Android manufacturers, in this case, it looks like that is ASUS, and simply order up a bunch of tablets from them.
As for challenging the iPad. I predict that this will end up as successful as all of the previous "iPad Killers" and challengers that have emerged these past few years, without a single one being victorious, and with most of them in scrap bins already and long forgotten about.