Early on in the process of planning our new High School, the Superintendent came to me with a definitive mandate: Design a school that will serve as a benchmark for other schools in the area of technology integration.....and do it as inexpensively as possible. This was no small task, but one I was excited to tackle.
      One of the primary complaints that our teachers have in terms of technology in our current building is the somewhat limited access to computers. Currently we have two dedicated computer labs and a library/media center equipped with 24 computers that serves as a third lab. The scheduling of our technology-centric classes, such as Business Computer Information Systems and Digital Graphics and Animation ensures that our two dedicated labs are filled most of the time. That leaves essentially one lab available to meet the research needs of the core classes (Math, Science, Languages, etc.) This simply is not enough.
      At first blush the answer seemed simple- add more labs. In the early planning meetings we began throwing out numbers- four labs minumum, five would be better. That would provide the necessary access for our technology classes and provide two (or three) additional labs to be used for research and testing. With the proposed mandate of online testing in the future, we would need far more capacity than we have now. We could make do with four labs, and could be comfortable with five. Then came the price tag. The Texas Education Agency requires that a computer lab be a minimum of 900 square feet in size. At an estimated cost of $125 per square foot the total cost for for the construction of a single computer lab would be $112,500. Five such labs would cost $562,500 just to build. That doesn't include equipping them with computers or the ongoing costs of heating and cooling such large spaces throughout the school year. In short, computer labs are expensive.
      So, I began looking for alternatives. I needed to find a way to provide our students and staff with the technology they needed at a price the taxpayers could actually afford. The answer was to eliminate the computer labs entirely. Instead of creating a handful of very large rooms with many computers, maybe it would be better to bring the computers into the classrooms. If we could do that, then we could provide ubiquitous access to computers without the construction costs associated with building computer labs, or their continual upkeep. This was clearly the best course of action. The next hurdle was figuring out how to bring computers into the classroom in a way that was cost-effective, sustainable, and functional.