GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C. — Guilford County Schools will be handing out nearly 1,000 laptops to some middle school teachers between Thursday and Friday.
"We are distributing between today and tomorrow a total of 950, 960 devices to our teachers," Jess Thomas said. She's the coordinator of Education Technology at GCS.
Teachers picking up the new devices said it will make remote instruction much easier.
"The screen is bigger so when you do your screen split you can see stuff a little more," engineering and computer science teacher Tiffany Faison said.
Thomas said the laptops are new & improved in more ways than one.
"Some of our older devices have issues with sound, teachers not being able to hear students, students not being able to hear teachers so that's one big improvement," she continued. "It's a faster-running device so it’ll be able to handle programs like Microsoft Teams which is where all our meetings and virtual classes are."
These laptops are a portion of the huge 79,000 laptop order the district made at the end of July.
RELATED: 80,000 laptops ordered for Guilford County students, but devices won't arrive for another 4 months
The whole shipment was originally slated for an October delivery. But a district spokesperson said they've been coming in increments, sending the following information to WFMY News 2:
We hope to have them in as soon as possible. The delay is a world-wide shipping backlog as everyone in the country and across the globe ordered devices at the same time when the Pandemic hit.
'For right now while we’re waiting on new student devices to come in, we are taking any older teacher devices we have, getting them up to speed and putting them in students hands just until we can get those new devices," Thomas said.
When exactly are they expected to come in?
"Elementary, kindergarten through third have already gotten their Macbook Airs and then hopefully we will be getting our student devices in. I don’t have an exact date on when those will be coming in but hopefully very soon."