Great American novelist and astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist of a student to notice the effects of technology in our own Cannon Falls High School.

Tremendous changes have occurred in the computer labs over the past few weeks. It has a completely different look and feel – like Cannon Falls’ very own NASA control center. Already there’s been a dramatic shift in our network infrastructure. The technology department (Rick Lee, Sandy Sharot, and Sam Singh) has worked to update the network to get faster speeds and bring better internet connections to all users. It’s been a bumpy flight, but we are hoping that the network issues will soon come to an end.

During the past week, we’ve gotten rid of our 2007 version of Windows XP and moved to the newer operating system: Windows 7 2013. Media teacher, Cindy DeRosier reports that the teacher complaints were low during the transition. She laughs and says that it “mostly confused kids, because 2013 looks so different from 2007…Mostly misplaced files that are not ‘lost-lost,’ so we do end up finding them.” However, Brooklyn Hanson is relieved that the slowdown is simply a passing starship, remembering, “The computers were so slow and no one really knew why. We spent at least three-fourths of our class time just waiting for the websites to load and jumping from website to website. As a result, we didn’t get much of what we wanted to get done.”

In the future, the process of moving to a one-to-one initiative – or, simply put, a device in every student’s hand – will be particularly exciting for teachers. DeRosier continued, “I think that as we start that one-on-one stuff that’s coming down, there’s so many cool things that the teachers can do in their classrooms….But oh my goodness, the stuff that’s available out there for other teachers to use in other classes is just awesome.” This new technology will make it easier for students to work on projects, type papers, or even just do research online. The device that Cannon Falls will choose is most likely to be a tablet device, but what kind is unsure as of this moment. As Rick Lee explained, “By making these changes, it will bring us one step closer to our students using 21st century learning tools in a world yet to be imagined.”

Carl Sagan would definitely approve of the sudden blast-off that Cannon Falls has taken. Now it’s just a matter of time before we’re traveling light years into infinity and beyond.