Technology

I was part of one of the first high school classes in the country to get chromebooks and oh boy were they AWFUL. Constant freezing, crashes, failure to boot them, all kinds of battery issues. For about six months we had teachers who relentlessly put their tests online and had us take t them on our chromebooks, but eventually most of them switched to paper because of the inevitable three-or-so students who would go "mine's not turning on" or "the screen's broken." They were fragile as hell too. The school said we'd lose our warranty if we were caught using them without the case, but even when they were inside the case they would regularly come out with cracked screens and broken keys. The internet speed on them was atrocious too. Our school wasn't known for ultra fast internet (in fact, some spots even were a cellphone data dead spot), but we had more than a dozen incidents of students using their phones to do assignments because the chromebook just wasn't connecting. The school had one IT technician and four librarians for a school of about 750, and they were working pretty much overtime due to how often the chromebooks would break.

I remember at the start they said we only had one free repair and then every repair after that would cost us $50, but the school had to change it to 3 free repairs because everybody's chromebook (including mine) broke.