Laptops For Every Student At West Suburban High School District
FRANKLIN PARK, Ill. (CBS) -- A west suburban school district is starting the school year Tuesday with new laptops for each high school student.
As WBBM Newsradio's Nancy Harty reports, the 3,500 students in Leyden High School District 212 picked up their Google Chromebooks last week, giving them some time to explore the machines and get to know the file sharing and apps.
LISTEN: WBBM Newsradio's Nancy Harty reports
Podcast
East Leyden High School principal Jason Markey says the 3G notebooks that store data on a cloud cost about $100 per student, per year, and the district is able to afford them because they are cheaper than filling labs with more expensive desktop computers.
Students will be able to take their laptops home, and are encouraged to use them in class with certain restrictions.
The Leyden High school District says it is one of the first public school districts in the state to provide a laptop for each student – a concept called one-to-one computing.
"Many view one-to-one as the holy grail of education technology, yet it's still very rare in practice," an East Leyden news release says.
With the Chromebooks, classrooms at Leyden could one day go paperless – with handouts shared through Google Docs rather than passed down each row of a classroom, and quizzes immediately graded and distributed through Google Forms, the district says.
Leyden High School District 212 includes East Leyden High School, at 340 Rose St. in Franklin Park, and West Leyden High School, at 1000 Wolf Rd. in Northlake.
