1-to-1 Computing | News

Miami-Dade Schools Rolling Out 100,000 Windows 8 Devices by August 2014

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/06/14

Miami-Dade County Public Schools has provided additional details about its move into 1-to-1. The district, which has 350,000 students, will be rolling out 100,000 HP and Lenovo Windows 8 devices by August 2014.

The deployment will start with 13,000 elementary school students and 15,000 students in seventh grade civics and ninth grade world history. At the same time Miami-Dade will distribute 10,000 interactive whiteboards to classrooms throughout the district.

Microsoft will provide Office 365 for the devices along with Skydrive, the company's cloud-based storage service.

That access comes as part of the company's new program, Student Advantage. Beginning last December, schools could obtain Office 365 ProPlus for students at no charge as long as they licensed Office 365 Professional Plus or Office Professional Plus for staff and faculty at the same time. The Office 365 ProPlus edition allows the user to subscribe to a version of Office that includes online editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access and Lync on up to five devices. Users don't need to be online all the time to use the applications; but they do need to connect to the Internet at least monthly to confirm the status of their subscription. The Office edition is installed directly on the computer.

Microsoft will also provide technical services to the district.

"Technology, by itself, is not going to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor, a gap that threatens so many of our minority students," said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho in a prepared statement. "But when technology is used correctly, we have seen powerful results in our very own technology-rich iPrep Academies, for example, with better test scores and increased employment opportunities."