Our school district also secured a big slice of the Race to the Top funds three or four years ago and might have gotten more in subsequent years (not sure). I would consider our district to be in the top half as far as incorporating technological tools even prior to the Race to the Top initiative. However, one of the problems that I have seen stems from the differences among schools within the same district. While the district is reasonably strong overall, there are wide disparities among the many schools in our very large district. For example, DS/DD are in a relatively new school, which was state of the art when it opened over a decade ago, but would probably be outdated in comparision to new schools opening today. I am not trying to stir up a debate, but at least in our district, the schools with high proportion of professional parents and above-average family income have students who substantially out-perform the school with a high propootion of poor working-class and welfare parents. I even recall a conversation with one of the teachers, who pointed out that our school had recommended retention of about 5% of the K students that year, but most of those students would have been just fine at these other low-peforming schools. The sad part is that it is not a question of these low-performing schools receiving less than an objective share of the overall tax dollars, but rather all the intangible benefits provided by better educated parents and students from secured middle-class homes. There is also the benefits provided by teachers who win grants/partnerships from corporations and foundations. For example, one of the magnet programs to which DS/DD have applied has a corporate grant/partnership that provides a tablet and sofware to each student.
Anyhow, our district has plans to fully implement one child one device within the next few years. However, the administration always likes to try different things on smaller scales to gauge the best way to proceed system-wide (over 100,000 students). There are always special pilot programs occuring at different schools. For example, even something like MAP testing took a couple of years to implement system-wide. There are also infrastructure issues. The district wants to ensure every schools have updated and sufficient Wi-fi acessibility to support all those devices. Personally, I think the goal of one child one device is very exciting because it will just be one more tool to enhance learning. Two of the goals are to enable more customized (differentiated) learning for different ability students and to have all students begin a second language starting in K rather than in 6th grade. By the way, I believe that buying software will be less of an issue with the trend toward web-based software. That's one of the huge differences I noted with my android versus my pc laptop.
