This evening at the Okoboji Community Schools board meeting, my purchases of 100 Asus Eee 1000 HE netbooks, 32 HP 6730B notebooks, and 4 netbook carts were approved. We are on a 4 year refresh cycle for our PCs here at Okoboji so these purchases represent those computers due for refresh. The great thing is that we are refreshing out 2 notebook carts with 4 netbook carts bringing out student to computer ratio at the middle school up dramatically.

Also, with some money that was left in this fiscal year's budget we purchased 5 eInstruction Interactive Pad. We are choosing to go with these instead of full blown tablets for the simple fact that we feel we get more 'bang for our buck' with a Interactive Pads plus a regular notebook than we would with a 'full-blown' tablet pc. We tried the whole tablet pc thing and we were terribly disappointed with them. We are hoping that these will also be more mobile and that the teachers will be more willing to hand these over to the students to interact with the lessons more often. We are planning to purchase 7 more of these pads for a 'beta' program in the middle and elementary buildings with the next fiscal budget as well.

As always professional development will be key to the project's success. I will write more on how we plan to do that part in a later post. We have some different ideas about how we will do that part of the project.