Maine ushers in a laptop revolution in the schools

Until this year, Emily Foster - a red-haired, freckle-faced, seventh grader - "despised" math.

"I never used to be that good at math," she says, flashing a bright, toothy smile. "But now, I've gotten a lot more confident."

A big reason for Emily's improvement is the small white computer she totes around Freeport Middle School. The laptop is part of Maine's first-in-the-nation program, which gave the state's 17,000 seventh-graders their own new Apple computers last fall.

Now, at the end of the experiment's first year, the consensus seems to be that it's a hit. Emily says she especially loves "Speedmath," a quiz game she has spent many hours outside class playing.

And teachers say laptops enable them to automate parts of the learning process - including quizzes and tests - thus leaving more time for them to focus on each child's needs. One report says it's even cutting down on absenteeism and misbehavior.

There are downsides, including a greater risk of plagiarizing information from websites. But many folks in this largely rural, lower-tech state, relish the laptops' arrival - and Maine's pioneering role in America's march toward higher-tech learning. In fact, the $37.2 million program is so popular that Maine plans to expand it to eighth-graders next year - despite a $1.2 billion state budget gap.

Since the computers are all linked to a wireless network, "a student can be walking down the hall and logging onto the web," says Kevin Perkins, assistant principal at Memorial Middle School in South Portland.

"The laptops give them access to many more resources," than the school library, he adds. The computers let them "go much more in-depth than they ever did before." They can create PowerPoint presentations, make movies, and design brochures.

Of course, many people here agree that the laptops aren't substitutes for good teaching. After all, it was Alex Briasco-Brin - Emily's long-haired, high-energy, math teacher - who wrote the computer game that sparked her love of math.

Mr. Briasco-Brin is no ordinary math teacher. This year, his students launched model rockets, dabbled in aerodynamics and aspect-loading ratios, and learned to calculate baseball statistics. They've even done fractals.

"Mr. Brin," as the students call him, is often more hyper than his charges. Each time the school's office manager calls the classroom, for instance, he instructs the kids to mimic an animal. "Cows," he yells one afternoon as he picks up the phone. His students moo like professionals.

But Briasco-Brin insists that the laptops have transformed his teaching. He says one of the best things he's done is develop the Speedmath program. Similar to a video game, the program gives the children progressively more difficult math problems, until they answer one incorrectly. Students compete to see who can get the most correct answers in a row.

"They've gotten hours and hours more practice than they did without the computers," Briasco-Brin says. Freeport students can even take their laptops home for extra practice. (Only about one-third of the state's schools let students take laptops home.)

Page: 1 | 2