Fifth grader Clayton Stults declared, “Bill Gates is a genius,” as he logged onto a wireless server using a brand new netbook on Monday at Lake Wilderness Elementary School.

As technology has rapidly evolved, the Tahoma School District’s strategies for using its tech levy money has morphed as rapidly, with officials embracing the best new gadgets available for education including the pint-sized netbooks.

The levy, passed in 2006, has been used for a variety of tools ranging from document cameras for teachers to upgraded computers across the district to better software to training sessions and salaries for technology coaches to support educators.

District officials had originally planned to buy laptops for mobile computer labs but chose instead to watch the growing netbook market with the idea those would be better educational tools.

Last summer, Dawn Wakeley, assistant director of teaching and learning for the Tahoma told the Reporter that district tech experts thought that buying netbooks would allow the district “to triple our purchasing power.”

After a pilot program with netbooks at Tahoma Junior High, the district decided to go with Lenovo netbooks, which have been deployed to all of the elementary schools.

All but Shadow Lake received three sets of 32 netbooks, mini laptop computers that are designed for better battery life and portability while retaining much of the same power of full size laptops, which got two sets since it is smaller than the rest of the elementary schools in the district.

Stults, who is in Tina Newberry’s fifth grade social studies class at Lake Wilderness, later observed how challenging it is to use the small trackpad on the 10.1 inch screen netbook.

Newberry was teaching her students about topographical features on a map by showing her students how to draw maps using Paint, a program on the netbooks, then showed them how to put the maps into slides in PowerPoint so they could eventually create a presentation in that software.

When Newberry found out the district would be sending the netbooks to the elementary schools first she thought, “Yippee! I can’t wait.”

“I immediately started thinking of possibilities,” she said. “My thoughts were what were we already doing that we could use these with.”

Her students were also thrilled about the new tools.

“They’ve been excited,” Newberry said. “When I told them that they were going to come in after the New Year, they came in on the first day (back from winter break) and expected them to be here.”

The wait wasn’t long as the netbooks arrived the end of last week and come Monday they were diving in and Newberry said her students “have been wonderful. They’ve been very careful.”

The real challenge will be to keep up with the student’s desires to use the netbooks whenever possible, Newberry said, because the school has to share three mobile netbook labs so her class won’t get to use them daily.

There will be plenty of ways to use netbooks, Newberry said, and she hopes there is some way to fit them into the math curriculum but as a social studies teacher “it seems to fit so well into that.”

“They’re really applicable and relevant to what we’re already doing,” she said.

District spokesman Kevin Patterson said it was high time elementary schools got a crack at testing out new tech tools, particularly portable ones like netbooks, because “the elementaries hadn’t really benefited from laptops till now.”

All this new mobile technology works wirelessly, Patterson explained, something the district did in 2007-2008 by putting in wireless networks and servers to support use by students and teachers.

Eventually, Patterson said, there will be 1,700 netbooks in use throughout Tahoma Schools.

Meanwhile, the technology levy is up for renewal this year, with a special election slated for Feb. 9.

The original levy raised $10 million.