Technology Gift Giving Guide...
"Santa is monitoring supply chains to ensure the Santa's Workshop elves have all the supplies they need to build all the toy requests!"
With the holidays coming up, the question always comes to us from Santa, “What kind of devices are St. Theresa students asking for?”
We told Santa that we use the following devices at St. Theresa School:
Grades PreK-2 - ChromeTablet 10e
Nifty little devices that are tablets and don’t have keyboards or trackpads. Add a case, for the durability issue, and you’ve got a nifty device. Cases we have on our school tablets.
Grades 3-7 - Chromebook Lenovo 100e OR Chromebook HP11a
Our 3rd-7th grade students are using Chromebooks. Chromebooks have keyboard, trackpads. Also look for a model that has at least ONE USB port, better if you can get a USB-C port, as this can usually also dub as a charging port. A display port is not always necessary on a student device - but may be a nice feature if you ever want to plug in and display from a Chrome device to a flat screen or other display surface.
Things to Watch Out for…
Construction - Most Chromebooks were designed with the student/school environment in mind. Pre-adolescents will drop things - for that reason, stay away from anything that doesn’t have rounded corners and lack durability… Another thing we’ve had bad luck with is any exterior buttons, as these seem to always take the direct hit, when the drop happens. At school, the Lenovo 100e and HP11a’s we’ve been happy with, in terms of construction and durability, and lack of exterior buttons!
Memory - With all the demands of multi-tasking and video on the internet, RAM is important to have plenty of. In general a device with 4GB of RAM is sufficient to run all educational apps and basic communication tools. Gamers generally will want more, 8GB or even 16GB. It comes with cost.
Processing - Processing has to do with the speed and amount of computations a machine can do. They range from clock speeds of 2.2 GHz right the way up to 3.4 GHz. A lot of new Chromebooks will feature such processors and because they are not as expensive as Intel i3, i5 or i7 processors. It means you will be able to get your hands on a powerful Chromebook at a pretty decent price. At a minimum, you should be looking for a Chromebook that comes with an Intel Core M3 processor. These processors offer great speeds, dual-core, four-thread processing power.
Supply Chain - We also heard from Santa that even HE is having problems with the supply chain. Even shipments to the North Pole are harder to come by - so while the elves are working hard to accommodate, Santa did not discount an “after-Christmas delivery.” Supposedly there will be some early “reindeer flights” to pick up supplies themselves!
