The days of the pen and paper are over, or at least they are fading away.

Some classrooms at SJHHS, and throughout the Capistrano Unified School district, have received carts of chromebooks. Chromebooks have been the talk of the school for the past couple weeks and people were very excited for them for about two days.

For those who don’t know, Chromebooks are laptops used to browse the web as well as use classroom centric apps such as Google Classroom and Google Docs.

Chromebooks allow students to access a class stream where they can find assignments and turn them in straight from their computer.

All this sounds great, but in reality it’s rather underwhelming. There’s no real gain in efficiency as the teacher still has to go through hundreds of documents to try to grade assignments.

Another major letdown is that Chromebooks are limited to the speed of the network; it will not work without broadband and with so many devices on the network, they go very slow. If the network goes down it can be a major problem for a teacher relying on the computers.

From what has been seen from the Chromebooks so far, they have been rather underwhelming.

It is easy to see the potential of these little machines in the classroom, hopefully they will be better utilized in the future.