Google yesterday confirmed that the Chesterfield County Schools in Virginia have agreed to buy around 32,000 Chromebooks for its students.
The announcement was made by Jason Katcher, Google’s Head of North America Large Customer Education Sales, who said, “As students in the United States put down their pencils and head out for summer vacation, educators across the country are hard at work planning for the school year ahead”.
“For some, it means putting together the summer reading list or having year-end conferences. For others, it means studying materials for a new syllabus or decorating the classroom. And for Chesterfield County Schools, one of the country’s 100 largest school systems, it means securing the best teaching materials and technology to greet students when they return to school next year — including 32,000 new Chromebooks.”
Katcher further said that Chesterfield, after testing and assessing the devices, ordered Chromebooks for all 32,475 middle and high school students.
He said that the best thing about the deal was that Chesterfield was able to move to Chromebooks with existing funds and that they could save huge by reducing the amount of classroom peripheral devices such as interactive whiteboards and replacing them with web-based tools.
They selected Dell Chromebooks with local partner TIG to provide training and support to ensure students; teachers and administrators reap full advantage of the many benefits of the new technology.
It seems like the intense rivalry brewing up between Google and Microsoft to capture the growing education market has turned out to be beneficial for schools as they are now able to provide more affordable technology to their students.
[Source: BetaNews]
