 Life is good all this month at Appalachian Wireless. Get the LG G5 for just one penny with signup or renewal of a two-year service agreement. That's almost $100 off the regular price. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. Jenkins Middle School has been a lot more tech-savvy this semester. The district issued Dale Brand Google Chromebook laptops to all students in grades 6-8 and all of the school's teaching staff. Before we rolled out the Chromebooks, we had extensive training and we made sure that all the staff were familiar with and comfortable with the Google suite of tools. We gave the Chromebook to the staff members before we gave them to the students so that they would have a head start on getting familiar with the Chromebooks and how they operated. The initiative, partially funded by grants and kicked off by a grant from the United Way, totaled about $25,000. The project has helped change the way students are learning at Jenkins. Through the use of Google's G Suite of applications, students can access for free. In my opinion, G Suite has probably had the biggest impact on education of anything that I've done in 12 years I've been a district technology coordinator. I've had lots of kids who don't want to do anything without a pick up a pencil, but they'll sit down and they'll type up a half a page of paper or they'll be engaged with a computer and do work. For a lot of them, they don't see it as work as much and so therefore they're more engaged. They're learning more than they would be with traditional instruction. I'm more hands on so when we stopped using the textbook and stuff, like everything got a little confusing. But now that I know actually how to do it, I like it better. The apps used by students on the Chromebooks are cloud based, meaning students like Michaela Stambo can access assignments and work at any time. Our stuff is portable, like with the Google Drive and stuff, I can't, I don't have to worry about, like I said, if I forget it, I don't have to worry about not being able to turn it in or anything and then we've got Google Classroom where we can like just turn our assignments in there and you have to worry about like losing anything or not having it turned in on time.