School Tech: 6 Important Lessons From Maine's Student Laptop Program

A Mashable article featured on Yahoo News takes a look at six important lessons that the state of Maine has learned from its student laptop program. In 2002, Maine signed a $37 million contract with Apple that provided 33,000 laptops to students and 3,000 laptops to teachers. In 2009, the contract was expanded to include some high schools. All 7th/8th graders and students at 55% of Maine's high schools are currently issued laptops. These are six major lessons that have been learned from the experience so far:

1. Treat technology as a tool, not a curriculum area.
2. Think differently about teaching.
3. Decide to do it, not pilot it.
4. Concentrate on current curriculum initiatives at first.
5. Support teachers as much as possible.
6. Make technology part of teachers' everyday language use too.