Managing battery life

When we visited other schools it became apparent that battery life was really important. That was three years ago when full size laptops didn’t actually have seven or ten-hour battery lives. And that’s why netbooks came onto the scene and that was another thing that was quite exciting about them is that you could have a battery charged that would last the whole day. The machines that we’ve got do actually get through the whole day. It takes a little bit of management to make that work, you know, students have 30 applications all running at once and a CD in the drive they won’t get through a whole day. But they’re quite motivated to, manage that.

Well every night you have to charge your laptop and MacBooks and MacBook Pros are really reliable. So, even if you forget to charge it one night we have chargers at school and Mr. Montgomerie will just issue us a charger and you can just use it for the day but most people charge their laptops every night.

We actually have charging stations around the school. We’ve just built three more so we’ve got four charging stations with security cameras on them, where students can leave their laptops anytime they’re not using them. They can leave them there overnight. If they’re going off to a sports thing after school or something they’ll leave them in the charging cabinets. The only issue with charging cabinets is they obviously can’t use them while they’re charging. We’re just addressing that by our current desktop system which is being taken down (it’s going to be taken down quite fast) every spot where there’s an iMac we’ll be replacing it with a built in charger. So then they will have spots where they can actually, if their battery has run out and they need to keep working, they can do that.