Google Chromebooks will be distributed to the Placer sophomore class of 2016, a decision made after a bill to adapt the states standard curriculum to that of Common Core standards testing was passed. These slick devices of the modern age will give students the ability to share and save assignments to the cloud, as well as access a library of digital work whenever they need.

The chromebooks are personally received and owned throughout the rest of the sophomores’ time in highschool, to an extent. The device can be taken home if needed or a possible alternative for storage in carts on campus which keep them safe from future obliteration.

Breaking and damaging the devices will result in a $250 fine, a reflection of the school’s policy when accounting for the treatment of textbooks and other . Over the course of summers the devices will be kept from students so as to continue the chromebooks use as updated and undamaged tools.

One of the intentions of the chromebooks’ was to offer places of education a tool “optimized for the web’s vast educational resources”, as the google website advertises. As expected, the chromebook will give students the opportunity to access the web, provided there is an internet connection available, and use it to gather content from the internet to study or assist uncertain students.

When you start your new chromebook, you are welcomed by a charming desktop background and a message prompting you for your google account information. Once you’ve logged in, a dashboard appears showing a variety of applications, all of which are google related, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. The shortcut most students will be clicking on is the Google Chrome application, revealing their drive which organizes all of their assorted documents. These documents are saved to the “cloud”, a network system which saves your content to google’s servers.

Some readers may be wondering why chromebooks are being issued to sophomore students exclusively, well the answer lies in three bone chilling words: Common Core testing. The class of 2016 is preparing to test the waters with the widely used curriculum of the Common Core standards. The “guinea pig class” is racked with mixed feelings of fear for this test, as it is meant to test the deeper thinking of students and throw them into to logical conundrums which they must try to understand through information they’d learned over the year.

This precursor to the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program is known to offer more challenging questions that increase and decrease in difficulty depending on the performance of the student. Since the class has no prior reference to the test and would be experiencing a program foreign to them, the district has decided to counteract this by giving the class chromebooks so that they may study more often with a tool personalized for their education and adapt to a world addicted to the web.

“In my education, my tools were pencils and typewriters,” World Studies teacher Mr Barry said. “In the modern age, kids are very skilled working with technology, so why not put it right in their hands?” Barry’s class, like many others in the social science department, has been given a number of chromebooks and frequently offers them to students so they may use them in his class when needed. He told me how the implementation of the devices could have something to do with the Common Core standards being a computer based test, and that computer literacy was becoming more of a necessity in these technological age.

So far, social science classes are the only classes to introduce the devices , but there is to be a meeting, of sorts, for parents and their children to attend on the 20th of November. The meeting is likely to be brief, and students who attend will be assigned their chromebooks for the rest of their three years here at Placer.

Freshman are to be receiving them next year, and the class after them and so on until the chromebooks have been fully integrated into school system. Some students who have learned of the chromebooks being distributed have shown a skepticism to how well they might be treated, though much of the staff and faculty has shown an enthusiasm for the devices.“I’m excited to see what happens,” Assistant principal, Steve Caminiti stated. “ It’s a big advancement for Placer.”

The funding for such a sharpening of the school’s technological curriculum totals to about $300,000 from the district. Portions of this money will be going to the actual purchase of these devices, their covers, the improvement of the wifi, and to other conditions for the chromebooks’ utilization. This large sum of money has left some individuals less than passionate for the devices’ arrival, their concerns derived mainly on what else the money could be used for in the school’s services.

The application of the new chromebooks is sure to see our school in a mixture of judgements. If the devices serve their purpose, than the sophomore class of 2016 can hope to see the new type of test in a less frightening light, but until then we can only wait and see what the new chromebooks have in store for Placer High School.