High Hopes for a Low-Performing, Rural School

Profiles in Success: Maine Public Schools

Augusta, ME — In the field of K-12 education, few initiatives have received the national visibility of Maine’s laptop program. With 40,000 wireless iBook laptops distributed to all middle school students and teachers in the state, the opportunity to collect data about the effects of educational technology on learning has been invaluable. As part of Maine’s research effort, Dr. Anne Davies of Classroom Connections International conducted a case study on one K-8 school in Maine. Her findings revealed a number of exciting benefits of technology-enabled teaching and learning.

Dr. Davies was asked to focus her analysis of the 1 to 1 learning initiative on a failing school, that was located in a community and had suffered an economic downturn. The first phase of her study took place between September of 2002 and June of 2003, with follow-up work to verify her findings between September 2003 and February 2004. To protect students’, teachers’, and parents’ identities, the school Davies visited became known as Eastern Elementary.

“The community was not feeling very good about itself, and everyone was eager to try to correct the things that didn’t work,” Davies says. “I ended up working with the entire K-8 staff — not just the teachers who were using the laptops — to help them put together an assessment system. That was very helpful in giving me a sense of what the environment was like before they received their iBook laptops.”

iBook Increases Student Engagement

Davies became a familiar face at Eastern Elementary. Hunkered down in the back of the combination seventh/eighth grade classroom, she closely observed teaching and learning with the laptops. She also conducted one-on-one interviews with students, sent and received “interviews” via email, reviewed 60 pounds of evidence of student learning, combed through 50 CD-ROMs containing still more student work, and examined a 9 GB hard drive archive of students’ digital projects.

“Where students might have written a single page before, now they’re writing a five-page story with their iBook laptops. There was almost a sense of awe, in terms of what they were able to accomplish.”

— Dr. Anne Davies, Researchers, Classroom Connections International

Davies’s research pointed out several themes and trends. Having access to a 1 to 1, high-speed, wireless environment emerged as the key driver for positive change in the classroom.

“The students all talked about faster learning,” Davies says, “and about being more motivated. We were able to document not only the engagement, but also the change in quality and quantity of work over time, too. Where students might have written a single page before, now they’re writing a five-page story with their iBook laptops. There was almost a sense of awe, in terms of what they were able to accomplish, and with whom they interacted.”

Positive Attitudes Prevail