VIDALIA — Patrick Wells’ ninth-grade world geography students have been asking him the same question nearly every day since school started.

“They keep asking me, ‘When are we getting our iPads, when are we getting our iPads?’” the Monterey High School teacher said. “I finally told them to stop asking me last week because they finally were on the way.”

Sixth- and ninth-grade students throughout Concordia Parish schools will soon be learning with new Apple tablets in their science and world geography classes as part of a district-wide technology upgrade project.

On Friday, 200 iPads were delivered to each junior high school and high school. Each classroom received a mobile cart that contains 30 iPads as well as a Macbook Air laptop for each teacher.

Wells and other world geography teachers throughout the district received a quick crash course Thursday on how to use the new technology in the classroom.

Ninth-grade world geography teacher Robert Haskett, who teaches at Ferriday High School, quickly went through the setup tutorial on his iPad and began tinkering with the device’s programs.

“I think my kids learn better when the material can be hands on like this,” Haskett said. “All of my students are very excited to get their hands on these.”

The upgrades are part of the second phase of the district’s $1 million technology enhancement project, which was approved by the school board in December. The funding comes from local sales tax revenues.

Superintendent Paul Nelson said the technology upgrades are aimed at giving students multiple options to learn and engage with the curriculum in the classroom.

“We have an obligation to make the material as interesting as possible to get these kids to really enjoy learning and be excited about it,” Nelson said. “So we’re always looking for things that keeps the students engaged and keeps them interested.”

Other districtwide upgrades — including replacing outdated desktop computers in classrooms and computer labs — are critical to ensuring students have the right tools to take annual state tests, which are now administered on computers, Nelson said.

The district is halfway through deploying 225 desktop computers to all schools throughout the district.

The Louisiana Department of Education requires all school districts in Louisiana reach 7-to-1 ratios for online access for all students by the 2014-15 school year. The requirements mean that each school must have at least one computer or device for every seven students.

Several schools in the district, Nelson said, currently meet those requirements and one school — the Concordia Parish Academy of Math, Science and Technology — is already above the requirement.

“The magnet school for example has a 1-to-1 ratio already,” Nelson said. “We’ve been very pleased with what we’ve seen out there as far as how the students are using the technology to learn.”

But the key to ensuring every device lives up to its potential, technology coordinator Paula Paul said, is having reliable and high-speed Internet at all the schools.

The district upgraded its wireless infrastructure over the summer to handle the increased traffic from the various new devices in all the schools.

“There were some spotty areas in our different schools with the wireless Internet,” Paul said. “With teachers downloading and streaming video clips, you need that bandwidth and Internet to support that.”

Mike Roboski, who teaches at Vidalia High School, said he was looking forward to using the new technology to bring a variety of worldly perspectives to the fingertips of his students.

“It offers so many different opportunities to hear and see the same subjects through different points of view,” Roboski said. “The possibilities are endless.”