Every day, LT students bring their clunky, heavy school-issued Chromebooks to school. 

Throughout the day, teachers ask students to take out their Chromebooks for notes, presentations, and other school-related activities. 

In this process, I often experience crashes from my Chromebook either related to Wi-Fi issues, constant lagging, update issues, etcetera. I think, This would be so much easier with my own computer and things like this wouldn’t happen as often.

With that being said, LT should provide Chromebooks to those who need or want them , but those who would rather use their personal devices should be able to use them in school.

During the spring semester of the 2019-2020 school year and the whole 2020-2021 school year, many current juniors and seniors bought either a computer or an iPad during COVID-19 for E-learning and Zoom. During those school years, those devices got used to their full potential while bringing them to school every day. That same device often goes unused during the day and perhaps at night. Those devices are only used, if ever, after school or on the weekends for school-related things. 

Additionally, a constant struggle with students is that personal Google accounts can not be used on the Chromebooks and only school Google accounts can be reached. This can be frustrating for students who need their personal Google accounts for Gmail, Drive, and other things. 

Also, a lot of the time for classes, teachers will link YouTube videos for academic purposes and a majority of the time that video is blocked. This disrupts the learning process and students possibly lose out on points for assignments. A solution to this is the option for one to use their own device where these altercations won’t occur. 

The biggest issue that students face with Chromebooks is the Wi-Fi. Specifically at NC, it is especially bad compared to SC. The slow Wi-Fi leads to Chromebooks taking a while to connect and once connected take a while to load and perform at an efficient pace.

Even though using personal devices can lead to cheating and in-class distractions, in the end using a personal device can lead to more productivity and less frequent issues with Wi-Fi and lagging. 

Still giving students the option to use Chromebooks, also allowing students to bring their own devices would take away from these recurring issues.