A few days later he told me that his classmate’s tablets were the same price as an iPad. It turned out that they were all using Windows RT devices. Apparently, the way the school worked really lent itself well to RT and the built-in office apps. Word was the preferred document format, and teaching handouts and collateral materials were distributed as PowerPoint files. Students were expected to turn in presentations and such as PowerPoint documents (hence the Citrix client availability for students who didn’t own the software). While these policies started when the vast majority of students were using laptops or the school’s computers, there hadn’t been any changes since other technologies became commonplace. And with an Enterprise Citrix deployment making access to the required applications possible from just about any device, there isn’t a lot of motivation to make changes.
I gave my son a brief background on the current status of Windows RT, but he was still interested in trying it out, so off we went to a local store so he could get some face time with a Surface RT tablet. He pulled out a USB drive with his schoolwork, plugged it in, and was able to do everything he needed to do, even on the demo machine at the local store.