Fullerton´s One-to-One Experience
A lot has been written about Fullerton’s one-to-one program, but CIO Tony Anderson says that you have to see it to truly understand it. Which is why the district gives monthly tours. “We’ve had a number of districts return a number of times to bring back key decision makers,” explains Anderson. “Once they see it in operation, they realize it’s really challenging to explain.”
One thing that’s likely to strike first-time visitors is the ease with which even the youngest students incorporate technology into their day-to-day learning. Step into a first grade classroom and one student might use a laptop with wireless Internet access to demonstrate that some dinosaurs were herbivores and others carnivorous: “Want to see how I know? Let’s Google a photo of a dinosaur and look at its teeth.” Another group of first graders might be enthusiastically following a lesson plan by opening a specified on-screen folder, reviewing the enclosed URLs, and answering related questions.
And that’s just a look at the first grade, where students use laptops from a mobile cart during the day. This particular school’s one-to-one program isn’t fully implemented until second grade, when every child is issued a personal laptop to take home.
Fullerton ’s 1:1 History
Fullerton School District started its one-to-one implementation with a pilot, a move Anderson strongly recommends for ironing out technical wrinkles. That was in 2004-2005. The K-8 district continues to roll out its program gradually, with the eventual goal of involving all students in one-to-one learning.
From the start, funding for the laptops has been a major area of concern. Anderson advises other schools, “I think it is absolutely essential from the beginning to make sure that if you are going to implement a program that you have an ability to provide laptops to everyone [in the grade being served]. That is why many schools start with just one grade.”
Community fundraising helped raise money for a number of the laptops for the launch. Chevron agreed to provide seed money and also helped the district establish an annual auction to raise additional money. The superintendent worked out a plan with the local Rotary Club in which the district would match a student to a donor who paid for half the cost of the laptop. Parents would pay the other half, and the family would own the laptop at the end of lease.
The district’s plans for family financing hit a glitch early in the process, however. In November of 2005, the ACLU wrote a letter expressing concern that the program’s requirement of fees violated the free education guarantee under the California constitution. Although district leaders believed the funding mechanisms stood on firm legal ground, with language in the state’s education code expressly confirming a school’s ability to sell or lease computers, they wished to reach agreement with the ACLU.
A settlement was reached in April of 2006. A key component of that document required that 90 percent of the families at a school or at a grade within the school either purchase computers or qualify for scholarships paid by federal, state and locally funds. The district was to provide the remaining 10 percent of families with laptops to borrow if they paid a nominal fee for insurance.
As required by the settlement, before the end of the 2006-07 school year, the district surveyed families in potential laptop schools with four choices for the coming year:
- I want my student to participate in the Laptop Program through a lease/purchase agreement.
- I want my student to participate in the Laptop Program through a grant/aid program.
- I want my student to participate in the Laptop Program using a District-owned computer at no cost to me other than insurance.
- I do not want my child to participate in a laptop program.
When the results were in, the district was able to fund laptop programs in all six schools surveyed. The district’s wealthiest elementary school had a vast majority leasing the laptops; the most financially challenged school, a junior high school, is funded with categorical funds. The remaining four schools have all identified funds or established fundraising plans for the required supplementary funding.
Program implementations vary a great deal from one school to the next, with several schools choosing to have the laptops remain in the school building rather than going home with students at night. Anderson acknowledges that maintenance costs are much lower for the laptops that reside in the school building although there are number of important benefits to the 24/7 approach afforded by the take-home program in the schools where it is implemented.
Laptops as Agents of Change
At participating schools enthusiasm is rampant. Anderson says that teachers often tell him that they never want to go back to the way they did things before. “We really saw from the beginning that the laptop was a catalyst for changing how instruction happens,” he explains. “It almost forces a change in instructional methodology where the teacher is not standing and lecturing and driving the instruction, but it’s the kids who are immersed and generating content. So in a sense, the laptop is almost a subversive device to improve the instructional process.”
Furthermore, while technical training helps improve the odds of success, Anderson emphasizes the importance of letting teachers take the lead when it comes to determining how to run the one-to-one laptop classroom. “The teachers have really developed the skills more collaboratively and through practice and experience than they have in direct training from us,” he says. Teachers typically develop projects tied to standards and rubrics to assess them. Students typically create videos, slideshows, podcasts, pages for web sites, or other presentations using the multimedia tools bundled with the Apple Macintosh laptops.
Even so, defining this new, digital classroom to the community remains a challenge and a necessity. Evaluations show significant improvement in 21 st Century Skills such as collaboration, communications and initiative, although standardized test scores show mixed results. Anderson hopes that state tests will eventually include the skills that employers look for. Meanwhile, says Anderson, the district contracts with outside evaluators to help track improvement in a wide range of areas that can be explained to the taxpayers.
Anderson hopes that the state legislature will recognize that a personal computing device for students is an inevitability. “If the district didn’t have to focus so much on fundraising,” he says, “we would have greater ability to collect and systemize data on what is happening in the classroom.”
In the coming months one can expect a growing number of resources at the Fullerton web site to help other districts who are interested in one-to-one implementations. Such information took a back seat while the district worked on its settlement with the ACLU but now Anderson and other district leaders are ready to evangelize about the benefits of one-to-one computing.
Perhaps the laptop program’s real power for change will be discovered when Fullerton’s students move on to high school – in a separate district with no current plans for a laptop program. The level of consumer demand should make for a fascinating case study.