Schools across the nation have been upgrading technology at a steady rate over the last five years. Laptops, Chromebooks and tablets are finding their way to seats in as many classrooms as they can. Even the school system in Los Angeles set out to deploy iPads for every seat in their system.

The Los Angeles initiative was a huge $1 billion dollar undertaking that got cut short after an initial rollout to just 47 schools at a cost of $30 million dollars. LA Schools Superintendent John Deasy quickly found that 300 high school students in the school system had circumvented the the security measures the school system had put in place and quickly filled those iPads with their own social networking accounts and other things that weren’t appropriate for the classroom.

That was a case in an enormously large school system. Smaller systems are switching out or implementing seat wide technology as well, and while they may not necessarily have the problems Los Angeles had, it’s a timely process for administrators, teachers and IT teams. Whether it’s a laptop, tablet or even a Chromebook every school or school district wants to make sure that all of the devices are uniform. In most cases they are getting the exact same version of the equipment you could by direct from the manufacturer or even at your local Best Buy. The problem with this is that every device needs to be unpackaged, charged and then outfitted with whatever software each school needs.

That’s not the case with the TabPilot system.

TabPilot is a complete turn key solution for schools and school systems that want to use a tablet for each of their students. TabPilot includes the hardware and the software to easily implement tablets across a classroom, a school or a district, just about out of the box.

TabPilot has a partnership with an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that provides tablets based on the Android Operating System which produces the Breea freedom HD Tablet.  These tablets are shipped with TabPilot’s tablet manager, including their Launch and Lock software, a proprietary skin on top of the Android OS that includes security features which render even hard resetting the tablet useless without an administrator/teacher password.

Once the school orders the TabPilot System setup is a breeze. The teachers can hand out a tablet to each student and at the beginning what they essentially see is an Android tablet with a wallpaper and that’s it. The teacher uses TabPilot’s management software,TabPilot Control Tower,  to decide which apps, and media are pushed to each tablet.

For example if a high school English class was reading the Great Gatsby, the teacher would pass out the tablets, and then use Control Tower to push the e-book or PDF to every tablet at the exact same time. Teachers can push apps, pictures, audio files, video files, text or other materials using Control Tower. They can decided if they want to push the content to one tablet, a group of tablets or all the tablets.

If you’re like me and remember the days when one part of the class used the red workbook while another used a yellow workbook and yet another used a blue workbook, students were smart they knew which kids got the smart books and which kids didn’t. TabPilot can make it easy for teachers with groups of students doing different work by setting up groups in the software.

TabPiot Control Tower can even alert the teacher when one of the tablets isn’t on task. The teacher can disable that tablet or even all the tablets at one time. At the end of the school day the teacher can send a customized message letting students know it’s time to pack up and put the tablets to charge.

The tablet comes in a few different configurations. TabPilot can supply just the tablet, or the tablet and a case or the tablet and a case with a keyboard based on the needs of each school. After the initial rollout schools just pay a per tablet annual licensing fee that can be as little as $5 per device.

You can find out more about TabPilot here. If you’re in Georgia, Alabama or Florida you can order directly from Federal Graphics which helped us with this story during the Alabama Educational Technology Conference. You can also visit with the founders of TabPilot at the upcoming ISTE show in Atlanta June 28th through July 1st.