By Jeff Eubanks
SPSD public information officer
The South Panola School District has purchased 540 Chromebooks – six per teacher – to be used in all K-3 classrooms at Batesville Elementary School, Batesville Intermediate School and Pope School for the upcoming school year.
 The Chromebooks will be housed in a Chromebook Charging Station, which will be mounted securely to the wall in each of the classrooms and can hold up to 16 devices.
Chromebooks are Internet-dependent laptops which start up in roughly 20 seconds from powering on and have 10 hours of battery life.
 The device is Internet-based and runs the Google Chrome browser and web apps, such as Google Apps for Education.
The Chromebooks may be managed by the district in “Guest” or “Kiosk” mode and restricted to specific applications, or it may be opened up for users to login with their specific @spanola.net (provided by Gmail) email address and will allow users to save their profile and data to the “Cloud” or Google Drive account.
Chromebooks are certified to run most (if not, all) State/District Tests and SPSD student assessment applications.
After licensing fees, each Chromebook costs $231, while the charging stations will top out at $490 each and come with a lifetime warranty.
 A report from USA Today in January showed that for the first time, Chromebook sales surpassed 51 percent in the K-12 market nationwide in the third quarter. Chromebooks’ market share jumped to 51 percent, while Apple products (mostly iPads, but also laptops and Mac desktops) declined to 24 percent and Windows-based machines remained steady at 23 percent.