Year One: Many Ways to Implement Antime, Anywhere Learning

Enthusiasm for the potential of the program started high and remained high throughout the pilot year, undiminished by the challenges schools faced.

The ways in which schools implemented the program depended on a variety of factors, including available planning time, financial and technical support resources, and concerns about providing equal access to students. Further, how the computers were perceived and appreciated also depended on several situational factors: the existing level of the school's technology program, the intensity of the implementation, the experience of the teachers, and the size of the classes.

For some schools, especially many of the private schools, the laptops came on top of extensive computer labs, lots of desktop computers in the classrooms and, often, access to family computers at home. However, for other schools, particularly many of the public schools, the program's greatest impact was not on the nature of computer access, but the fact that they provided any access at all. Administrators said they saw the program as the first real opportunity they'd had to provide wide-scale computer access to their students.

While all administrators agreed that a full time, one-to-one ratio, 100% inclusion model was their ideal, they cited various constraints which led many to adopt other implementation models. The five models we found are:

Each of the differing approaches to implementation yielded encouraging outcomes that sustained the program and satisfied the schools. However, models which provided one-to-one and continuous access elicited the most praise and allowed the most time for developing integrated curriculum uses.

The underlying vision appealed to teachers, administrators and parents in a wide range of school settings and can be sustained in some fashion by each school that chooses to participate. Even the schools that began the project late in the school year saw outcomes that portend or demonstrate positive changes in teachers and students.

Teachers are using the laptops inside classrooms in many ways, with different benefits for students. These variations are a product of many factors, including the implementation model, the school's prior technology background, available staff development, varying class sizes, grade levels and subjects, and individual differences in approach to teaching.

In schools which have had the laptops the longest, classroom applications seem to evolve in stages. First, many teachers and students must learn the very basics of computer and application use, and they often do so in tandem. Second, teachers move on to a stage of experimentation, in which they emphasize computer use, trying a variety of approaches and then gauging the results. Finally, once a range of uses have been explored, teachers tend to focus back again on the curriculum, and employ the laptops as tools when they seem most appropriate.

Similarly, teachers report that student use evolves over time. Students begin with lots of exploration, and their work tends to have a lot of "bells and whistles"-various font styles in Word, for example, or extensive animation effects in PowerPoint. Later, as they acclimate to the laptops and software, they move towards more "substantive" uses.

Many of the teachers who must engage classrooms full of laptop owners are still attempting to master the technology and software, yet they can usually relinquish the role of expert to students who have already progressed far beyond teachers' abilities. The program encourages teacher risk taking.

Teachers are taking on new roles as learners, often looking to both colleagues and students to assist them, while students are becoming the teachers of their faculty and of their peers. These new roles are a direct consequence of the intensity of the technology changes in the participating schools.

Teachers can identify ways in which their participation in the program is beginning to modify their teaching styles and approaches to instruction.

Changes in student attitude, motivation, and behavior are seen within a very short time for those students participating in the program. Teachers identify an array of benefits to student learning strategies and to learning outcomes. Among the benefits widely perceived are increased collaboration, movement towards independent learning, greater enthusiasm for schooling, and more engagement in problem solving.

Teachers point out ways in which the availability of laptops and software tools can help individualize instruction for students with a range of needs-from special education to advanced students, from satisfying different learning styles to holding the attention of hard to reach students.

Schools contended with a variety of barriers during the pilot year, including: Reliability of hardware given intensive student use; Meeting the needs for parent education; Providing sufficient training for curriculum integration; Working with less than the full, concentrated model; Improving students' keyboarding skills; Identifying strategies for financing and scaling up the program. Yet, once the program was underway, problems were quickly forgotten and the potential of the program to improve teaching and learning become the focus of activity.

The experience of the pilot year participants yields important information for schools and districts wanting to begin a laptop program. Schools planing to initiate or expand the laptop program need to consider: