Yesterday while talking with my Dad about Tablet PC deployments in the classroom (K-12), I began to wonder about the current distribution of Tablet PCs across the various grade levels. So this morning I pulled up a spreadsheet Lora, Layne and I have been maintaining to see if I could generate some meaningful charts to illustrate what’s going on in the market.
Unfortunately, our data isn’t organized the way I wanted and after about three hours of shuffling things around, verifying pieces of information, I realized I wasn’t going to get done today. There are simply too many schools to do a rush job.
What I’m most interested in is which grade levels are using Tablets. It would also be interesting to visualize where the Tablets are going (public vs private schools), how Tablet deployments relate to non-Tablet deployments (both Apple and Windows based as well as Tablet PC versus Pocket PCs and UMPCs), and the rate of adoption. Given the time it’s taken me to get this far, I’ll probably only get to the first point.
In fact, I only got about a quarter of the way through the data. However, here’s a quick and dirty pie chart that shows the current distribution I have for Tablet deployments in the K – 12 grades.
This chart shows the percentage of Tablet units per K-12 grade in the US. I’m counting Tablets that are in use during this school year (Fall 2006).
I decided to only post percentages for now since the details will definitely change since I’m not finished tallying everything up yet. You can, however, see a significant trend in the data–namely, that Tablet deployments are currently focusing on the upper grade levels. This is what I expected. I would imagine that Tablet deployments at the collegiate level would dwarf those in the high schools, but maybe not.
By the way, I’m only counting one-to-one initiatives that have been published in press accounts or on school websites or that people have emailed me about. (Realize my numbers include just the deployments that we’re aware of; they are probably not exhaustive and more than likely incorrect. Hopefully, not by too much though.)
Anyway, I’ll share some more as I get further along.