Amazon’s Whispercast Expands Its Reach To More School Districts And Universities
Part of our job as your technology partner is to keep you informed on what’s happening in tech land. Today we want to discuss a service that is offered to schools around the country.
Whispercast, an offering started by Amazon in 2012, is a free service for schools to dispense educational apps, eBooks, digital course material, and eTextbooks to thousands of school computers.
“Whispercast is now used in more than 130 of the 250 largest school districts in the US and over 2,400 higher education organizations, including 24 of the 30 largest in the country,” according to CNET.com.
Recently Amazon released enhancements to Whispercast. These new tools will allow school teachers and college instructors a lot more flexibility when buying and distributing digital content and material through their service. And, to the delight of many, Amazon is now offering Digital Transition Services for schools to more quickly begin using this much needed service.
Whispercast allows a school to share rented or purchased apps, eBooks, and other digital content to devices across their school district, which includes Amazon’s Kindle e-readers, as well as other devices such as iPads, laptops, and Chromebooks.
Organizations that use Amazon’s devices with this service have much more control over their device settings. This is awesome because it allows the school to block students from accessing Facebook or other social media sites and making problematic changes to their Wi-Fi settings.
According to Amazon.com, they have many in the education world who are thrilled with this service. For example, one of the school districts in the Houston area, “They made it manageable for a district the size of ours to transition to digital learning,” said Dr. Linda Macias, Cypress Fairbanks ISD.
There are other tech giants, such as Apple and Google, that are working on providing similar services to schools.
Outside of the education arena, some businesses are currently using the Whispercast service to distribute digital training material and other content. However, Amazon would like to expand that part of their service in the very near future.
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