Despite the excitement for the new computers at Freedom Area High School, many of the students feel that they’re hurting more than helping. These computers have completely new programming, which for those of us that have gotten used to the old way, could be a problem. We use these computers every day and we should know the differences and how they’ll be affecting us.

The first difference reported was that these computers have Movie Maker but not Sony Vegas. This is very difficult for some students, especially DTV students, since they use Vegas to create our video announcements.

“The school had to personally get us Vegas,” Senior Amanda Fischer said. This is also difficult for seniors to get used to, since they have had Vegas on their computers for three years and have gotten used to all of Vegas; they have no clue how to go down to Movie Maker. This can frustrate and ultimately stress them out over a simple project when they already have enough stress during school.

The second difference was reported by Mrs. Valerie Marburger, one of the computer teachers in FHS. “[The computers] are completely up-to-date at this point, which is great,” Marburger said, “They are getting what is out there in the market and in the business world.” However, she later went on to say that the teachers are not updated with what the students have, the students have a better quality of programs than the teachers have. This could cause a rift between the teachers and students.

For example, if a teacher still has an older program and creates an assignment in which students have to use that program, the students may not even have that program anymore to do the assignment. Therefore, the teacher would have to completely change their lesson plans to fit computers that they don’t even have, making their lesson planning harder.

Students have reported some problems with some of the programs that have already been used, like Movie Maker. If they worked on that program for more than 10-20 minutes a notification box would show saying that there was an error on the program and would exit out of their work, causing them to have to restore their work and even then the most recent work would be gone. Their computers also freeze up quite often when they decided to add or change something in their work. This can be very aggravating.

There are good things about the computer updates. For instance how the computers are no longer “frozen” (unable to save changes or personalize our computers), so students can save their work without having to worry about where it’ll be the next day. For freshmen, this is a great concept, since they haven’t gotten used to the old ways. Even for upperclassmen they can have less stress on them with the unfrozen computers.

“I think over time [the students and FHS employees] will adjust to what we are doing now,” Mr. Tom Hickey said, “We are having a few growing pains and trying to respond to everyone’s’ concerns but in the end I think students and teachers will be comfortable with the new system.” These next few months, it will be crucial for students to get used to the programs we have now and forget the past. As for everything else, we’ll just have to work as a team to get through it.