Maine ushers in a laptop revolution in the schools

The laptops have also made it easier for teachers to design and grade tests. Now that the computers do more of the work, Briasco-Brin can spend time giving students one-on-one instruction. "That's the best teaching situation - to get to know kids individually," he says.

Briasco-Brin has embraced the new technology from the start, but others were more dubious. Elizabeth Miller is a seventh-grade social-studies teacher at Memorial Middle School. She describes herself as a techno-skeptic, who still uses a rotary phone.

When the laptops arrived at Memorial, Ms. Miller had two worries: that she wouldn't be able to learn the technology and that the kids couldn't be trusted to safely and responsibly handle the $1,700 machines. "I have kids who can't even remember to bring pencils to class," she says, laughing. But now she's a believer, even if a slightly cautious one.

In a recent world-geography unit on the Silk Road, Miller's students scoured the web for details about cities along the ancient trade route. She found that the lower-level readers were dramatically more engaged. "There's something about having it on the screen that means they're more willing to stick with it," she says.

After researching the topic, the students wrote and edited their papers during class - instead of in the computer lab - as Ms. Miller glanced over their shoulders. "I got a far better quality of writing than I've seen in my seven years of teaching," she says.

One danger of using the laptops, though, was plagiarism - which is made much easier by the copy-and-paste feature of many programs. "If a sentence has a dependent clause smack in the middle, and if there are too many three-syllable words, you start to wonder," Miller says.

But there has been relatively little dishonesty or abuse, school officials say. Briasco-Brin's students profess little desire to play illicit games or instant-message their friends during class. They know their computer will be taken away quickly if they do. And they know that John Lunt, the school's computer guru, can see everything happening on their computer from his office.

Overall, a mid-year evaluation, conducted by researchers from the University of Southern Maine, found that students using the laptops were more engaged in school, doing more homework, and misbehaving less than in previous years.

Other studies have come to conflicting conclusions about laptop use. But regardless, the trend is spreading. Districts from Florida to Virginia to California have launched similar projects.

Yet, for Ryan Petersen, one of Briasco-Brin's students, the computer has been nothing but great. He was earning C-minuses in math last year. Now he's getting B-pluses. The computer has also become an extension of his personality. He has pictures of fast-and-furious cars on his screensaver, for instance. The biggest bummer about the laptops, he says, is that he and his classmates must turn them in before the end of the school year. "I was really hoping that I could take it home over the summer."

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