With the exciting news that De Soto High School is preparing to allow students to bring their own computers from home, I have heard from many students who are anxious to break away from the dreaded laptop carts and just start using their own devices now.

In elementary school, when my teacher checked out a laptop cart, I always dreaded every second of the class ahead. At the time, it was simply because I took at least two hours to figure out my login information and then had to slowly chicken peck a URL into the keyboard.

By middle school it was required that students get a number of technology credits and that meant learning to type correctly. After raising my typing speed to over 83 words per minute, using technology became a lot more convenient in regards to doing homework and communicating with others.

It was a complete slap in the face when I finally reached high school and was forced to return to hand writing a majority of my assignments. So much time is being wasted when I have to wait to go home to finish an assignment that would have taken 20 minutes in class.

Don’t get me wrong, we could be much more worse off than having a few Mac and Dell labs and then several typically functioning laptop computer carts.

The issue that I have is that even with the technology that is available and the growing number of ways that we could make use of it in the classroom, DHS still seems to be repressing it. While the district is working to set up a network that allows us to use the internet at school, we should still be able and allowed to use our own devices right now.

Rather than having to waste time on figuring out which laptops are going to be nice and cooperate during class, I know that I would get a lot more done if I were able to simply pull out my private computer and do the assignment on Microsoft or Open Office. Neither of these need the Internet, along with many other different programs.

While the DHS administration has been taking big steps in opening up to technology over the three years that I’ve been here, they aren’t quite the leaps and bounds that I had hoped to see. The use of technology has done nothing but grow all of my life. I see no reason for us not to embrace and take advantage of every possible aspect of it.