The Leveling Effect of Our 1:1 Initiative

Five years ago, a glimpse into any given classroom within the Poplar Bluff R-I School District in southeast Missouri would look much like this with respect to technology: A Smart Board, maybe a couple of desktop computers and a whole lot of paper and pencils. In some ways, I envied school districts with one-to-one initiatives, knowing that in our rural part of the state, providing personal devices to our students was a pie in the sky idea.

That all changed after I heard a presentation by Mark Edwards, superintendent of North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District. He and I met in March 2012 during the annual Missouri Association of School Administrators conference. As he talked about the demographic makeup of his district — the population, the free and reduced lunch rate, etc. — the wheels started to turn. Maybe going one-to-one wasn’t a pipe dream after all. I left the conference with a renewed energy to introduce the concept to our school board.

Partnering Needs

Living in rural Missouri presented several challenges. Our technology gap is the consequence of the disparity among our students: the haves vs. the have-nots.

Twenty-first century learning wasn’t happening in and outside of our classrooms. Students need differentiated instruction so they can develop communication skills and learn to work together as a team on projects. We started with a one-year pilot in fall 2012 at our junior high, which houses 800 7th and 8th graders. Each pod received a cart of MacBook Airs.

After figuring out some WiFi issues, the trial run went exceptionally well, and the teachers were in large part on board. The following year, we purchased 800 Macs and by 2014, we deployed 1,500 laptops to students in grades 9-12.

There are several key points in leading a successful digital transformation in a smaller community. Students need access to rich content, so we chose to partner with Discovery Education for its curriculum materials. Our students use the science and history techbooks in class and can access a vast array of educational video clips, articles and imagery.

The Discovery team recognizes that WiFi access can be an issue in small, remote districts, so all content is made available for downloading during school hours so students without Internet at home are not hampered in their learning.

The second key factor was choosing a versatile learning management system. I saw the need for a unified platform for teachers to be able to organize their content, interact with students and, most importantly for us, to communicate directly with parents. In our area, we have a largely blue-collar workforce, and many of our parents do not have the opportunity to speak with teachers or know what is going on in the classroom with their child’s learning progress. We adopted Schoology to address these needs because it allows parents to follow exactly what their child is studying and to communicate digitally with teachers on a convenient timetable.

Prepared Instructors

Lastly, we invested in professional development and spent a lot of time on the front end, preparing our teachers before the one-to-one digital transformation occurred through networking with other districts. I wanted to ensure teachers knew the device was just a tool to aid in their instruction, not a replacement. The initiative would have been a flop if we simply substituted a device for textbooks.

While running schools in a rural community definitely presents its own set of problems, I believe we have really been able to address the major challenges, leading the region in one-to-one initiatives. Each student receives a device and accesses the assigned content to experience a world beyond the four classroom walls. When I walk down the halls and look into the classrooms today, I see students creating projects, solving real-world problems, being innovative and preparing for a realistic future. They should be able to compete on the same playing field as anyone else.