The Chinook School Division held their first board meeting of the new year on Monday, and they discussed the technology status report for 2017.

Manager of Information Systems Rob Geiger said the biggest change last year for the division was the upgrade in hardware to Chromebooks - a type of laptop - which is almost complete.

"By the end of this school year, we should have renewed as much hardware as we are going to renew in the immediate future," he said. "We will still be purchasing a few Chromebooks in the next couple of years, but this year the large bulk of it will be done."

Geiger says that the response from the schools about the Chromebooks has been very positive.

"It's been one of the most positive technology changes I've been involved with in my career," he said. "Again it's not perfect, but schools tend to be happy with how well they work, how quickly they boot up, how easily they can get them into students' hands."

In 2017 about 1,500 Chromebooks were distributed to schools in the division, and another 950 are on their way to finish the full deployment of Chromebooks.

Geiger adds that since Chromebooks have an expected life of four to six years, he wants to put a financial plan in place where they put $150,000 a year over four years to replace the Chromebooks. 

"The idea was when we had to buy a whole bunch of new hardware this last time; we had to have a large infusion of cash to pay for them," he said. "It's sort of like if you were to buy a car, you could either go out and get a loan for the car when you bought it. Or you could say I'm going to buy a car in four years and put aside money for four years, that you don't have to worry about where the money is going to come from. It's just simply a way of planning for the future."

Currently, 20 of 29 schools have received their full inventory of Chromebooks.