Dinosaur Laptops

Dinosaur Laptops

            Education, safety, consistency, these are all things that schools provide for students around the world. The school is responsible to provide a high education to their students. In order to do this, students need a focused consistent education that includes the tools they use to aid their learning. Skagway High School should make it possible for students to take their regular school laptops, which they are accustomed to, rather than the bulky “Tyrannosaurus” laptops (other wise known as T-laptops or Travel laptops) on school sponsored trips.

            Average adults generally forget three things per day. (The Telegraph) After you walk out the door to go on a trip everyone has that “OH shoot” moment when they know that they have forgotten something important that they will simply have to life without. For me, it is often a computer file that I forgot to transfer from one laptop to the next. Students enrolled in all four sports this year will be travelling on trips for an approximate total of thirty plus school days this year, sometimes a week at a time. (Skagway School) By forgetting one file you can get up to a week behind in school work, simply because you did not have time to, or forgot to, transfer files and were unable to work while traveling. Falling behind negatively impacts not only the student’s grades, but also their performance in sports.

Furthermore, when travelling, we often have to walk to and from ferry terminals, hotels, and airports, hauling our luggage with us. By changing our laptops from the light airs to the heavy travel lap-tops more weight is added to our stuffed back packs. We are not only carrying lap tops, but also a text book or two. On a trip my Freshman year I needed to bring both my science and history book on a trip, added to the laptop weight my bag weighed just under thirty-six pounds. According to Science Daily, damage to muscles and the skeleton is the frequent consequence of carrying heavy backpacks. This especially affects growing teen’s bodies. By keeping the Mac book airs students would reduce their backpack weight by two and a half pounds, (Rick Hess) thus saving them from considerable back issues in following years.

They are not only named T-rexs for their size, but also their slowness. When I opened my travel laptop to work on this essay it took four and a half minutes for it to boost up. The screen was locked for another two minutes. While this time does not seem large, it begins to add up as you need to research your paper, opening multiple tabs on a travel lap top causes it to slow down considerably.

            Finally, we do not have a one to one ratio of travel laptops to students. This causes an availability shortage. In the Basketball teams’ recent trip to Regionals students were forced to share laptops when travelling which was an issue for two reasons. The first being that we were housed separately from some of the people that we were sharing laptops with. The second was that we all needed to use the laptops at the same time. By allowing students to bring the Mac Book Airs on trips each student would have a laptop that only they were responsible for.     

            There is, however, a logical reason why we don’t already have access to the Mac Book Airs while traveling. The reason is money. Mac Book airs can cost upward of one thousand dollars and losing a piece of equipment like that would cost the school quite a bit. However, students and parents already sign a release form that has them agree to pay for costs and damages of our travel laptops and regular laptops. So why can’t we change the release form to include the mac book airs as a travel laptop? Also, on switching files between the computers shouldn’t it be the student’s responsibility to make sure that they have everything that they need for a trip? The answer is frankly, yes. Students should be able to have all of their files in an area such as the cloud so that they can access them on trips. However, internet accessibility is often slow or nonexistent. For example, our basketball teams travelled to Angoon and Kake this year on a week-long trip. We were told we would have internet in Angoon, but when we got there found out that we were actually being housed in “the old school” that has no internet. When we went up to the “new school” the internet was so slow that my online textbook was unable to load. Furthermore, due to proxies Google Drive is not bale to automatically sync your travel laptop to your school laptop.

There is a reason why dinosaurs are extinct. We need to let our old T-rex laptops retire and instead, looking toward the future, bring our school issued mac book airs wherever a school function is occurring. In order to save our education and our backs the Skagway School Board should change their policy to allow for students to take their Mac Book Airs on school trips.