My students need their Dell laptops to run effectively. The 35 512MB RAM upgrades will allow their 1-to-1 laptops to start up faster and open MS Office and browsers faster and better.
$1,078 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
It's still trying to boot! It's so slow!!!" These students love using their Dell Latitude laptops, but hate losing precious time in booting up and opening MS Word or FireFox. Our equipment is outdated, but still works. The 512MB upgrades let the students cut to the chase.
In our Title I elementary school many children have no home computer.
Many come to school highly motivated by the technology classes and gain solid skills that carry through into middle school. Our students are from immigrant families: from Mexico, Yemen, West Africa, China, the Dominican Republic. Their technology classes include one-to-one laptops, wireless internet access and student produced content. But at home, many have only a cell-phone to access the web. New York is a tech capital but some neighborhoods are across the digital divide, so school is where kids can get 21st century skills and have rich investigations into their world. At our school, children plead for the chance to be tech assistants or help in any way, during lunch or recess time. They want to learn and practice and go deeper with what they already know is possible. The eagerness and seriousness are only matched by frustration when their equipment is outdated and running slower than it should.
My Project
So what will happen with this grant? Our 5th-grade tech team will gain real world experience performing under-the-hood upgrades on the existing laptops, and they'll have the vivid before and after measure of what having adequate Random Access Memory (RAM) means to the computer's performance and the user's experience. These 10-year-olds and their younger schoolmates will have that concrete engagement with their world, ensuring their old but functioning laptops can be made "new" again: not by some wave of a magic wand, but because of a specific solution they explored and applied themselves.
After upgrading, each laptop will be signed by the students who worked on it, a source of earned pride and participation in their learning environment. Experiences of this kind allow these young tech users to realize how their own work really is continuous with the practical world beyond the school's walls. And because we get new life out of the older laptops, it's also environmentally sound.
Students know this project can not move forward without outside support.
The children know that some donors will recognize, as they do, the importance of practical real-world and hands-on experience where the outcome (higher performing laptops) is a value added to the school and one that will benefit users in lower grades, as well as the students who actually take part in the grant-enabled activity. This grant gives on more than one level: here, students are participants not just recipient
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. C. and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
