Geek Dream: The Perfect Day Of Integration

    A laptop was handed to me as I turned in my rental form.  The school had finally decided to let us rent laptops throughout the year that were "ours".  We could use them around the building, but we could also take them home.  Taking them home was optional, and you had to pay extra for it, but it was well worth it.  These laptops weren't the chinsy Dell ones that we used to have; these were top of the line Dell Latitudes.  With reasonable processing speed, 4 gigabytes of memory, and a 300 gigabyte hard drive this thing-although it wasn't an HP- was a monster of a laptop.
     By this time in my high school career the school had finally figured out the wi-fi system and it was fully prospering.  It could fully reach all corners of the school without having issues connecting.  There weren't anymore complicated passwords to get into the network, and the firewall that once reigned supreme throughout the high school was abolished.  Seeing as we're "adults" at this age, the district finally realized that we could have the self control from looking up inappropriate things.  They set up a system where the user would be flagged if they searched key words into search engines or went to sites that were explicitly for adult users.
     I frolicked down the hallway with my laptop firmly clasped to my chest and made my way toward my first hour class.  Our first assignment of the day was to write an essay on someone who had influenced our lives and share it with the teacher at the end of the class period.  This was now an easy task to do.  All we (the class) had to do was pull out our laptops and write: instead of the normal rampage down the hall to get to the library and get a computer.  We now worked more quietly in class because everyone was focused on the assignment.
     Having the laptops gave more order, and also gave stricter deadlines; it's something I noticed throughout all of my classes.  Although some sneered at the stricter deadlines, I thought they were nice.  They gave you less time to procrastinate, and were followed by a lot of class work time.
     Despite all the fears of the school officials, having all of the technology and access to the full internet didn't make us less social and disconnected from the rest of our peers.  Lunch was perfectly normal.  We didn't act like zombies staring at our laptop screens; everyone ate lunch, talked, checked their phones occasionally, and just acted like average teenagers.



     The end of the school day wasn't much different from the beginning, except the fact that I was now placing my laptop in my backpack and heading on my way home.  I had robotics later that night so I had to hurry home and get my homework done, the majority of which was now saved on my laptop.  There was barely a need for my many folders because a few of my teachers had learned over the summer how to turn worksheets into PDF forms that could be filled out.  They then put the PDFs on their websites and we could download them from there.  It was convenient because my homework could now travel everywhere with me without me having to carry my big, bulky backpack around.
     My robotics team had gone pretty far last year; we were ranked pretty high considering last year was our first year, but this put a lot of pressure on us.  I was in charge of marketing, and a major part of programming and design.  I was getting ready to leave my apartment, but I didn't get a chance to finish up all of my homework.  My coach told me it was ok if I brought it along to work on during some down time in the practice.
     We had started brainstorming our robot design, but still didn't have our ideas organized.  I got to practice about thirty minutes early so I could talk to my coach about some ideas I had, but when I walked in the door he smiled at me and told me he had a surprise.  He was really excited about the laptops at the school because I now had a laptop to work on.  He handed me two disks: one for RobotC programming and one for a CAD program.  These would be the keys to my success within the team!  I quickly installed them in my computer, and started inputting our design ideas into the the CAD program.  It was a good practice.
     Later that night, after practice, I finished up my homework and edited my college application essays.  I decided that this was going to be a good school year, without a doubt.  This laptop was going to be a key asset for my success.

In the eyes of some people this may be a senseless piece of drabble, but to me it's really important.  There are ideas in here that I feel could be really important to the learning process of students, and I hope that they will be seriously considered.