Akins has received over 1,000 new Chrome-book laptops, replacing the previous small student laptops that the school used to provide.

These new laptops have better features that can help students during class time, cutting down on technical problems that plagued the older ones.

“They’re so much better than the previous ones. The booting takes less than two seconds,” computer technician teacher Bob Williams said. “It doesn’t have Windows so it take up less memory disk, and its much faster — plus you don’t have to worry about viruses as often.”

The school district purchased a total of 1,050 laptops for Akins, using money that was approved by voters as part of the 2013 bond election. The Chrome-books were viewed as the best deal to meet the budget requirements to help meet students’ instructional technology needs.

“Part of that bond was technology upgrades, and through that bond, AISD could only afford one computer for every three students. Thanks to that we were able to receive 1,050 laptops,” Associate Principal Manuel Garcia said. “That’s how the district purchased those computers across the district to all the high school, secondary campuses got the same ratio.”

The types of laptops that were bought with the budget were 360 Toshiba Chrome-books with a 13.3 inch screen, 390 Dell Chrome-books with 11-inch screens, and 300 Dell Latitude 3150 Windows laptops.

Every teacher will have the same opportunity to access a Computers on Wheels units (COW), which house as many as 30 computers in each cart. With all of these new computers on campus, some training was required for all teachers to show them how the new computers should be handled.

Teachers will sign-up to use the COW when students are working on projects that require computers. To avoid fighting over who’s turn is it to have the COWs next, Garcia said they have been located in nearby rooms so teachers can easily communicate with fellow teachers about when they need the computers.

Since the upgrade, students are able to use these COWs with fewer problems with access to computers, helping them get their work done a lot faster than before. Plus students said they enjoy how they can just sign in with no problems connecting to the district’s network and experiencing connection problems.

“Yes, I really like the new laptops that we have now instead of the previous ones because we don’t have to wait so long to connect to the server,” junior Julianne Tran said. “With the new laptops that we have now we’re able to log in with just one click.”

Garcia said he hopes that another bond issue for technology would be approved by voters to get the computer to student ratio to 1:1.

“We’re hopefully getting more so that every student can use a computer,” he said