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In Maine, they do one-to-one with laptops. But in California’s Saugus Union School District, they prefer netbooks.

Despite their avid loyalties to different hardware devices, these school administrators, on opposite coasts, concur on one-to-one strategy: successful advocacy and implementation of one-to-one programs must focus on educational vision and goals, and educators must frame the issues and solve the problems.

“One-to-one is not a tech project,” says Jeff Mao, technology director for the Maine Department of Education. “IT staffs focus on speed, availability, and tech support. That’s why one-to-one should be run by the academic community, developing solutions that will help achieve educational goals” instead of by IT staffs, he says, who might incorrectly conclude that a request is too difficult or not worth the effort.

In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide one-to-one program, buying an Apple MacBook laptop for every middle school student (seventh and eighth grades) at a cost of $40 million for the first four years and $13 million a year thereafter. The motivation for Maine’s program, which was spearheaded by then governor Angus King, was to attract business and spur economic development through the creation of a tech-literate workforce.

The state’s one-to-one passed a critical milestone last fall, when 55 percent of local districts agreed to pick up the tab to expand the program to their high schools, despite the erosion of local tax bases during the current economic downturn. Maine’s one-to-one remains the nation’s only statewide program currently funded; Pennsylvania cut all funds for a newer, similar program last summer.

Started in middle school to prevent experimentation that could jeopardize college admissions, Maine’s laptop program has demonstrated that it helps teachers prepare lessons and boosts student learning, especially, Mao says, when the laptops are used for writing or collaborative, interactive learning and not simply as word processors (which has sometimes been the case).

For example, one middle school used MacBooks for a class river expedition, analyzing water quality, collecting other data, interviewing experts, and making a movie. Another middle school used them to study greenhouse gases; the online research expanded into field trips, interviews, and political lobbying on behalf of the environment.

Alice Barr, instructional-technology integrator at Yarmouth (ME) High School, says that one-to-one has already been expanded to her award-winning school (which Newsweek ranked fifth in New England), one grade at a time, starting with the freshmen who had used MacBooks as eighth graders in 2002-2003. A relatively affluent, professional community, Yarmouth has funded the MacBook purchases through a technology line item in the local budget every year.

The laptops have changed the way Yarmouth High students study and learn; kids collaborate in video chat study groups at night, becoming so close-knit that, Barr recalls, one student bemoaned the loss of an AP history group at the end of the school year. The biggest difference she’s seen with one-to-one is that students have more confidence and are more willing to tackle difficult problems and brainstorm solutions with their classmates.

Meanwhile, in the 11,000-student Saugus Union School District, northeast of Los Angeles, Jim Klein had been watching Maine’s one-to-one experiment from the get-go with a mixture of excitement about its educational potential and concern about the computers’ disrupting classroom instruction. According to Klein, Saugus Union’s director of information services and technology, laptops require constantly recharging batteries; replacing the units, which are easily damaged; solving operating-system problems; and maintaining a complex support infrastructure.

“Laptops are a logistical nightmare in the classroom,” he says. “The reality is that implementation is very challenging. But you’re never going to hear that from a one-to-one district.”

Nevertheless, recognizing the potential of portable devices to make education more relevant and student driven, Klein successfully made the case for the district to spend Title 2D NCLB funds to buy 1,700 Asus EEE netbooks, one for every fourth grader, in January 2009. The netbooks, which run on a Saugus customized version of Ubuntu Linux software, cost about $300 apiece, substantially less than laptops.

Saugus Union having concluded that writing is the key to learning, the first semester pilot targeted writing specifically and English in general. The district was blown away by the year-end test results. After only one semester, English language arts and writing scores had risen by record amounts, up 24 percent and 37 percent, respectively, from the previous year. Writing scores were double the state average, says Klein.

“We know that the higher scores were the result of the laptop program,” he says, adding that lower scores came from the few classes where the netbooks were not used to their potential.

Buoyed by that success, Saugus expects to buy another 1,400 netbooks in January 2010 for the present fifth graders, who had them last year, again turning to federal NCLB grants for funding. Saugus will expand netbook use throughout the curriculum this year and switch from Asus to Dell Mini 10v’s, which have larger screens and keyboards. Ultimately, the goal is to expand their use to the sixth grade as well.

The netbooks have been popular with teachers and parents alike; hundreds of parents have bought the devices voluntarily so their children could take them home.

“The netbooks have exceeded our expectations,” adds fourth-grade teacher Eric Greenfield. “To see kids sharing information, working collaboratively, and sharing ideas has been very exciting.”

The netbook purchases, however, are coming at a sensitive time, says Klein, as teacher layoffs loom in the fall and the economy is adversely affecting the community as a whole. But the district’s difficult fiscal situation may make it easier for it to require parents to pay for the netbooks, particularly because the price is so reasonable and they can be used for all three years. A parent pay model may be introduced as early as the fall, he adds.

As for Klein’s laptop criticisms, Maine’s Mao doesn’t deny that schools can struggle with these problems, but he says that Maine had planned well to overcome them.

Maine solved the battery problem by changing the bid specifications to require batteries that last the entire school day; schools also installed chargers in libraries and student lockers. In addition, Mao says, Maine has a great support contract with Apple and has even worked with the company to make hardware design changes to accommodate tougher student use.

Maine also created an online dispatching system and its own repair depot, serviced by its own statewide transportation network, to ensure repairs in 24 hours. By running the repair depot itself, adds Mao, the state can see trends in what causes problems.

“There are tons of minutiae in the infrastructure,” he says. “The key is figuring out solutions to deal with them “and creating a support system that works for each school, regardless of its skill set.”

In addition, the state found a workable middle ground, standardizing all schools on a stable, locked-down software “image” (the operating system and applications) to minimize IT management problems yet allowing individual schools to add their own favorite software on top with a local installer.

Mao says that adopting one-to-one will ultimately result in a cost shift from paper to digital and wireless text and multimedia content. And when these digital publishers seek students to test products of the future, he says, Maine will have the platform to give them traction and help the market grow.

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Kevin Hogan is Editorial Director for Tech & Learning Magazine. Read more about technology in education at http://techlearning.com

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