The beginning of a school year brings change every time round. This year, Mayfield High School began with a technological bang for the school – chromebooks for every student. Across the school, many people had diverse reactions to the change.

The first strong opinion in the school came from math teacher Kim Scarfo. For Scarfo, the options available in the classroom with the chromebooks was a positively viewed widespread.

Scarfo said, “I like the impromptuness of being able to on the fly do something that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to do in the past and so I enjoy not having to get a classroom set or having to go to the labs because that was very difficult.”

Unlike Scarfo, junior Caitlin Bruce had an opposing opinion towards the new technological advancements that took place. Bruce said, “They are extremely inconvenient. The fact that everything is based off of chrome makes your life harder. Say if in a class you needed to download a software, you’re not able to do that.”

Bruce continued her frustration in saying that not only were the chromebooks a poor choice but so are the installations on them. She said, “They web filtered too strictly. It messes with the research we have to do for class. When researching for my paper in psychology, I was restricted in what I could look up because on the chromebook the Stanford prison experiment was labeled as inappropriate content, even though it is educational.”

The viewpoints between students and teachers are mixed but the general theme leads to believe that the average of the school is in favor of the student-friendly laptops.

Senior Charles Andrews found the positives in having the chromebooks. He said, “I think they’re beneficial to the school because I think they’ll replace many unnecessary costs to the school. They also help me keep all my work organized and checking my grades is now easier because I don’t have to use other devices.”

What may be contrary to popular belief, the final person to offer an opinion is music teacher Brian Fancher. The incorporation of the technology into his curriculum holds a confusing aura to it which Fancher cleared up.

Fancher said, “They will have a massive impact on the way that I teach as well as interact with my students on google classroom on top of the students interacting with each other via google classroom. It’s a situation that we have not had before.”

“So far we’ve only used them a couple times. We used them for a writing assignment on music comparison. In the future, I hope to be able to use them for recording. Because each student has their own chromebook, they would be able to pull up a website and record themselves singing in our group and submit it as an assignment.”

Despite Bruce’s frustration with the inconvenience of the devices, the junior admits her favorite part is the portability of them. She said, “It’s nice to take them home, especially for the people who don’t have computers at home.”