Lenovo backs Windows devices for the classroom

Lenovo believes the education market is continuing to rely heavily on Windows despite the increasing popularity of Android, iOS and the Chrome OS in this sector.

With Microsoft ending extended support for Windows XP and Office 2003 in April this year, there is likely to be a lot of activity as schools upgrade their products.

The Chinese firm, which claims a 20 per cent share of the education market worldwide, is confident that when schools start refreshing their legacy devices in 2014, they will jump to Windows 8. This is despite fierce competition from the likes of Apple and Samsung, as popular consumer devices like the iPad and Galaxy Tab trickle down into schools.

"The death of Windows is greatly exaggerated. It's still the vast majority of the business in education. It's the matter of choosing a device that's right for what you want it to do," Sam Morris, worldwide education executive at Lenovo told IT Pro.

"If it is primarily content delivery devices [schools want] there are lighter devices out there from a capability standpoint. The web as a platform is also a more viable proposition. People like WeVideo are bringing video editing to the browser. Those kinds of things are great."

This view is in stark contrast to Samsung, which envisages its Chromebook business to boom during 2014 as users shun Windows.

Interestingly, Morris also said there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve digital textbooks in schools.

"Just because you can click on a word and it shows a video - that's not interactive we need to better [explain] what interactive is," he continued.

"Interactive to me [is] reporting data back to me about student activity. Can the student embed their own work within the text? Not just highlight. Can [teachers] embed quizzes? Does the textbook fork itself based on [a student's] reading level?

"Until we get those kinds of seminal changes in the textbook industry they all look like A4 sheets of paper to me," he added.