College Community School District expands student laptop program

CEDAR RAPIDS — In a back corner of a storage space in the College Community School District's central office, dozens of laptop bags sit two to a box, color-coded by homeroom and stacked several feet high on rolling shelves.

These computers are part of an expansion of the district's '1-to-1' initiative that will give each student in grades 6 through 12 this fall a laptop computer. The district this summer is buying more than 2,000 new computers for the program, and that means an extensive organizational process for its information technology staff.

But for students and teachers, technology director Craig Barnum said, the increased availability of technology in the classroom can lead to deeper thinking, new teaching practices and better insight into which students are paying attention in class and which aren't.

Programs like this one, which place computers directly in students' hands rather than in computer labs or on mobile carts, have become more popular in recent years among schools in Iowa and other states.

IT workers here say they're ahead of the curve. The College Community district began planning its initiative several years ago, Barnum said, and in the fall of 2012 officials provided each student in grades 9 through 12 with a MacBook Air laptop.

This summer, Barnum's staff is working on 300 new MacBook Air laptops, which now will be distributed to students in grades 10 through 12, and 1,750 new Google Chromebook laptops, for students in grades 6 through 9.

The district this year will spend $930,000 on the program, Barnum said. The laptops are on a four-year replacement cycle, meaning costs of more than $500,000 in future years.

Other Corridor schools have similar programs. The Clear Creek Amana Community School District provides each middle school student with a computer, technology director Joe Francis said, and it will provide one to each high school student this coming year.

At Xavier High School, each student is issued an iPad, said Nick Ireland, a spokesman for the school.

But for the Marion Independent School District, the cost of buying a computer for each student would make such a program infeasible, said technology director David Canaday.

'We don't have the taxable resources to really make that happen,' Canaday said, though he hopes someday the district will provide Chromebook laptops for students in grades 5 through 12.

Putting the computers in students' hands is only one part of the program, Barnum and Canaday said. Teachers also have to adjust their practices to make the computers worth it.

For example, Barnum said, typing a paper with a Google Doc on a Chromebook, rather than using Microsoft Word, doesn't make much difference.

'Big deal,' he said.

Instead, students should 'collaborate in real time with a content expert. Gather some feedback outside the school with a Google Form,' Barnum said. 'You can't do all that stuff without the 1-to-1.'