Seton-La Salle Catholic Students Excited For Chromebooks
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - High school students at Seton-La Salle Catholic are on the fast track on the information super highway.
Going back to school was a little less painful as every student is getting a Google Chromebook.
"Hopefully it'll be good just because I've heard a lot of new computers coming out in college. Stuff that you're [going to] need one anyway for certain classes or depending on what major you're [going to] have, so this might just be good to learn how to use a computer on a daily basis because although we are the computer generation, I don't use the computer every day for school," Cecilia Bashaw said.
This endeavor makes at Seton-La Salle Catholic the first school in the state with computers in hand across the board for all 520 students.
"We didn't even think it was going to be much, but when we opened it and started playing around with it, we realized that there was so much stuff you can do together. You don't have to be in the same room or anything. There's an essay type of thing where you can type at the same time and work on the same project without having to be close together at all," Rocco Gagliardi said.
To keep the focus on schoolwork, when the computers are connected to the school network, social media websites like Facebook and all inappropriate websites are blocked.
"In some of the classes, already we have textbooks that are online. Social studies in particular really embraced this and for the freshman and sophomores, all of their social studies books are going to be online accessible which means they don't have to take a text book home with them. Anywhere they have their Chromebooks, they have access to it," Principal Lauren Martin said.
Even technophobes are okay. The school's computer network seamlessly and invisibly updates the laptops when needed.
"Just the fact that I can take it with me to all my periods and just take all my notes on there. I'm pretty excited," Levi Masua said.
"It's basically inevitable that the students of this generation are going to be heavily involved with technology. It's important for them to transition from them being consumers of technology to the producers of tomorrow," Mark Tomczak from Google Pittsburgh said.
