By Aubrie Wise

Junior Editor-in-Chief

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The modern age is sweeping the nation in its push to go digital. Teachers are running Instagrams and using Bitmojis in the classroom and slowly districts are beginning to go one-to-one with Red Lion recently joining the buzz.

Every student in the Red Lion Senior and Junior High School has their own device that they carry with them from class to class, and even home. The idea of one-to-one, a device for every student, is becoming more and more popular as paper information becomes outdated and the internet becomes the best classroom

The process of going one-to-one has been very detailed and organized at Red Lion. Before taking the leap of going one-to-one, the school conducted multiple trials including specific teachers being one-to-one, wifi tests, and the Junior High as a whole was one-to-one last year.

“The laptops are pretty good, (they) helped a lot overall,” Charlie Jess, a freshman who was at the Junior High the previous year during the one-to-one experiment, said. “For me, being digital makes it easier to get things done.”

One-to-one has remade the idea of an online classroom. The use of tools like Google Classroom and Remind have changed the day to day class. From the survey conducted by Red Lion administration, 80% of students have reliable high-speed internet at home which is a good sign for teachers who are going digital.

“From an online perspective I do like one-to-one,” Andrea Rohrbaugh, a history teacher who has an online class. “I know now that my online students will have access to a computer which is their primary resource that they often don’t have when taking an online course.

A large question that comes to mind when looking at Red Lion’s one-to-one devices, is the seniors having different devices. Instead of the new Chromebooks, the rest of the student body has, they are using the Dell laptops Red Lion had from the previous years.

“That was a really tough decision, what we were looking at is we have these devices that we believed were still quality, they were still going to be used. The Dells are four years old, and our process is usually a five to six-year replacement,” says district Supervisor of Instructional Practice and Technology, Mr. Tim Smith. “We wanted to maximize the dollars we had, if we had to buy (Chromebooks) for seniors as well… we may have had one more year of not having one-to-one environment in our school.”

The number one advantage of going one-to-one is the accessibility to the internet and what that means for the students. By every student carrying a laptop, they all have immediate access to Google and its expanse database of information. The answer to almost any question is a just click away.

”The laptops are enabling the kids to all be on the same playing field,” says junior Gianna Dovell. “We all have the same access to information.”