As back-to-school season climbs into high gear, some students are already hitting college campuses. At Southern Illinois University, freshmen are going to get a nice surprise: they’ll receive Dell Latitude 10 touch-enabled tablets running Windows 8 under a program called “Mobile Dawg” – for free. It’ll come pre-loaded with digital textbooks, course materials, Office 2013 and an assortment of student services.
In a post on the Microsoft in Education blog, SIU CIO David Crain says they’ll “also be migrating approximately 30,000 student accounts from Google Mail to Microsoft Office 365 online communication and collaboration tools.”
In fall 2012, there were 3,000 first-year students out of a total of about 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students at this school, which Crain says the Carnegie Foundation ranks as “among the top five percent of public U.S. institutions for research.”
Choosing the Windows 8 tablets over Apple’s iPad was easy, says Crain. Not only did it amount to a savings of $4 million over four years, but also, “The tablets offered 50 percent more processing power and 100 percent more RAM for the money, they are more robust and will last longer, and they come with a better warranty than Apple offered. Windows 8 tablets have better technical features, such as a USB port, they are HDMI-compliant, and they have a port replicator so we can use them in our labs with keyboards, mouse and monitors. Unlike iPads, Windows 8 tablets run full-scale applications and we can plug them into our existing Microsoft management and security tools to easily maintain them in a way that’s consistent with our policies.”
Read more about SIU’s story on the Microsoft in Education blog.
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Athima Chansanchai
Microsoft News Center Staff