Warren tech experts show what they can do
Laptop computers provided to all students for this first time this year at Warren Township High School in Gurnee are more than devices to help the teenagers with their classroom work.
Warren District 121 hosted a tech academy open house Tuesday afternoon for the school's Chromebook initiative. Sessions were at the Almond Road campus for juniors and seniors and the O'Plaine Road building for freshmen and sophomores.
During Tuesday's open house, visitors learned about Warren's technology support internship and watched fellow students in action. The help desk students are able to receive industry-recognized certifications, District 121 officials said.
"I just thought it was a wonderful opportunity to get to know more about Chromebooks and computers and how you fix them and how to take them apart," sophomore Megane Beaupre said when asked why she got in the program.
Officials said the help desks were created to provide further student opportunities with Chromebooks.
All 4,300 or so Warren pupils were equipped with a Dell Chromebook computer to start the 2015-16 academic season. Officials said the Chromebook was preferred over more expensive Apple iPad tablets, based on student and teacher feedback from test programs.
While Chromebooks are manufactured by Dell and several other companies, all use Google's Chrome operating system. Applications and other resources from Google for Education are used.
District 121 became the latest suburban school system to have what education insiders call a "1-to-1" initiative, representing the computer-student ratio.