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Sleeping is real crack up for Going Digital devices
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The number one way that students are damaging Panasonic 3E tablets issued to them by the Manteca Unified School District?

They are stepping on them and breaking screens.

Foot damage and how it is happening has surprised district officials.

“It’s not happening at school,” Superintendent Jason Messer noted. 

Nor is it happening on the way home. 

The damage is occurring in students’ bedrooms.

Messer explained that students are doing homework in bed and placing the tablet on the floor before they fall asleep. When they wake up in the morning they forget that the tablet is on the floor and step on it and crack the screen.

Panasonic’s rugged design allows the computers to take being dropped upwards of 50 times before a failure occurs but engineers didn’t plan on people stepping on them.

Cracked screens are the No. 1 cause of tablet damage since the rollout started six weeks ago. That’s said it is still an extremely small amount given there are 23,000 tablets in use.

Messer said the district is tracking all damages that occur so they can address ways to reduce it.

As for the cracked screens, the keyboard and stylus don’t have to be replaced meaning the damage isn’t a total loss.

“No student or their family has had to pay to replace a damaged (tablet),” Messer emphasized.