The Kings Local School district has recently been given a technology grant worth $27,000 dollars to spend on any technology of their choice.

Treasurer Shaun Bevan said that the Kings technology department was able to use the money for whatever technology equipment that they requested.

“In order to receive the grant, Kings had to make a proposal of what we were going to use the money for, which is new chromebooks,” said Bevan

After the proposal was approved, the technology department was notified a couple months later and they began to order new chromebooks.

Technology/EMIS coordinator Deann Burns says the grant will be used to purchase new chromebooks to be distributed throughout the district.

“There will be 2 chromebook carts to Columbia Intermediate school and 1 cart sent to the Junior High building, with 30 chromebooks on each cart.” said Burns.

With all of the charging cables, the licenses for each of the computers and the chromebooks themselves the grant will provide the 2 schools with the additional resources to help incorporate technology into student’s curriculum.

Baradford Media Ccenter Specialist Chris Chamberlain has seen the positive effects that the chromebooks bring to the district since they first were introduced in the fall of 2012.

“We first introduced 90 chromebooks into the high school as a pilot to see if the students and teachers liked them. The battery lasts all day on the chromebooks and that went over extremely well with students and teachers,” said Chamberlain.

Compared to the previous laptops provided for the students, the chromebooks were the better option. For every laptop purchased, you could buy 2 chromebooks for the same amount of money and update automatically compared to the old laptops that had to be manually updated.

“With introducing the chromebooks, we also introduced Google Drive instead of using Microsoft Office. The staff and students had an overwhelming positive response to Google Drive because they can access their documents and projects from home.” said Chamberlain.

Google Drive is now the primary source of document saving and sharing in the district. Students can even share their documents with their teachers, and teachers can give comments on the paper all electronically.

With all of the advances of the chromebooks in the district, the new chromebook carts can help all of the schools in the district with modernizing their technology that benefits everyone who uses them.