New laptops introduced to Apex High School for student use

Meenakshi Sathish
Editor-in-Chief

         It is cloud nine at Apex High School’s media center. The school is the first to receive seven hundred (of the 52,000) laptops in Wake County as part of the Capital Improvement Project 2013 (CIP 2013). The media center is filled with Styrofoam and innumerous amount of black carts filled with fresh laptops which are part of the 3-to-1 initiative. This means that in every (core) class there will be a cart of laptops for the students for the means of collaboration. For every one laptop, there will be three students assigned to it. The reason this is a big deal is because it will offer a lot of flexibility in the classroom and curriculum. In order to be able to use computers, teachers have to make reservations at either the media center or computer labs. That being said, there are only a limited number of desktops in the media center and only a couple of computer labs in the school available for use. Considering the number of classes who need to use computers on a regular basis, it is both frustrating to teachers and students when they do not get access to a computer. Now, students have access to computers right in their class. Also, a lot of the work students do now is via Internet. Typing up papers, researching for projects, and accessing important information from teachers are all significantly computer-dependent. Now, students can access everything they need without having to scavenge the school for a free computer. Nevertheless, Ms. Munger still encourages students to come to the media center. 

The changes do not just stop there. With the introduction to laptops, the school is making a shift from being a desktop-school to a wireless-device school. This means not being restricted to a desktop and doing work and instead having that flexibility to work anywhere. This initiative goes hand-in-hand with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative. The means of the BYOD initiative is to incorporate technology into the classrooms and making use of the advantages that come with incorporating education and the internet. Apex High School is on its way to becoming a school that helps students prepare for a world where soft skills, like understanding software basics, are becoming almost a necessity.