Stone tables tablet deal

Public sector specialist Stone Group partners with Tablet Academy to help ease customers' hardware headaches and avoid 'naive' purchasing decisions

System builder and VAR Stone Group has linked arms with Tablet Academy – a specialist training and consultancy provider to the education sector – to help customers make the right hardware purchasing decisions.

The partnership, known as TalkTechTeach, will offer a complete consultancy, purchase, training and support service to customers buying new mobile hardware, particularly tablets.

Each side will benefit from the partnership, with Tablet Academy gaining access to Stone’s 2,500 customers, and Stone getting the use of Tablet Academy’s 30 training centres across England.

Both firms claim that the deal will help education providers avoid "naïve purchasing" of the wrong hardware, offering customers a complete audit of the capabilities each device needs to support their students.

Professor Steve Molyneux, chief executive of Tablet Academy, said: “The TalkTechTeach partnership has been formed to provide an end-to-end service for new and existing customers of both parties. We’re leveraging the expertise on both sides, with the aim of encouraging head teachers to put tablet devices in their technology estate for informed and workable reasons.

“Stone and Tablet Academy want to turn around the purchasing process of tablets for schools, so that they are thinking of the impact the devices will have on their teaching programmes, rather than just the ‘tick-box’ approach of supplying on demand.”

Initially the initiative will see free consultancy sessions held between Tablet Academy, Stone and senior school leadership teams. Both sides will then supply the appropriate types and numbers of devices to those schools and work with them on migration, integration and any network requirements.

Simon Harbridge, chief executive of Stone Group, said the two firms went together well.

“Tablet Academy is a perfect fit for Stone’s ambitions to show our customers how to see these devices as pedagogical enablers,” he said. “There’s a lot of scope for better awareness in education of how deeply your purchasing decisions will affect your ability to teach various subjects, both in and out of the classroom. Some devices might not be suitable options. Some might be overlooked for aesthetic reasons, for example.

"Tablet Academy will work with educators to analyse the perception gap between what’s needed and what’s being requested, and Stone will supply, integrate, train and manage accordingly.”