1 to 1 Dos and Don'ts

My school board is showing interest in a 1 to 1 laptop initiative in our school district. Now that there are a number of districts around the US and rest of the world piloting these projects, I'd like to pose a couple of questions. 1) What practices have you implemented or observed that are showing great promise, especially in engaging students at the high school level? 2) What pitfalls should a school embarking upon this path avoid to get such a project up to scale as quickly as possible? Thanks in advance for enlightening this struggling practitioner!

Tags: 1 to 1, Laptop Initiative, OLPC

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Permalink Reply by Jack Phelps on November 20, 2007 at 8:58pm

Hi Randy~

1:1 is hard to do right, but well worth trying! My first suggestion if your board is interested is to study up on what Maine has done. I'm a bit biased as a former resident, but the state has really got the model right. You could also try to connect with a few thought leaders like Pamela Livingston or Mike Muir, if you'd like (just google the names). But as far as penning ideas down here, I can give a few things to make sure you think about:

--Buy a package from hardware vendors. Bundles are usually used to add unnecessary goods and services to a necessary purchase, but with 1:1, your district probably doesn't have the expertise to be successful without one. How are you going to handle maintenance, support, insurance, networking, professional development, software, and the rest? I hope this isn't insulting, but the number of *failed* 1:1 programs is not insignificant, and it's usually because they didn't have the expertise in-house to plan for everything they need. So put out an RFP asking for *comprehensive* bids, rather than bids on just machines.

--Think hard about software. This is my area of expertise, by the way, so I'm very biased. I run a company called ChitChat (http://ChitCh.at), which offers a just-released free educational network that allows teachers to create free interactive class websites that automatically facilitate content sharing amongst teachers. We also offer a product specifically for 1:1 schools, however, a market we tackled because *most of the existing products are not useful*. Traditional learning management systems like Blackboard, Moodle, or StudyWiz experience major user adoption problems (nobody uses them) because they're not better than working on paper. So what your district should do is identify the specific types of activities it expects teachers and students to use the computers for, and ask itself where it's gaining value over 1. paper and 2. less-than-one-to-one, and where it's not.

If you've got questions about the second, I'd love to talk more! Our software isn't packages by any vendors, so we're kind of in conflict with the first :) But we're getting there.

Best of luck!
-Jack

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on November 21, 2007 at 3:33pm

I'm one of the people who know a little bit about everything (but a lot about nothing) but didn't I read recently about a study that said 1:1 didn't improve achievement in studied districts and some districts that had the 1:1 iniative did away with it; I'd guess you could google that. Also, in my humble opinion, more hardware isn't the answer.