In the library at Jesse Waugh’s northwestern Toronto high school, there are a half-dozen computers all the students want: they know they’ll get logged in within five minutes.
“When you think of it, waiting five minutes to log in — that’s long,” says the 17-year-old Grade 12 student at York Memorial Collegiate. “But for school standards, they’re the fastest in the class.”
Such is life in GTA public schools. Hardware that can’t keep up with newer software and applications being fed into it and networks overwhelmed by too much digital traffic are two common problems that can plague public schools as they struggle to arm their students with so-called “21st century skills” such as technological fluency inside constrained budget envelopes.
