![]() The girl calls out, “No way! That’s what I sound like? A four-year-old who just inhaled helium?” ![]() When Emma plays the finished product of one girl’s story, the class bursts out laughing. The students turn their attention to the front, where Hogan and a girl named Emma demo on Garage Band software how to record their voices, how to set the words to music, how to align each speaking part with a parade of corresponding images. “Lids down!” Hogan says-and every laptop in the classroom closes. “I’m a genius!” The students deftly type their stories into Word documents, and then open their Facebook accounts-not to chat or browse each other’s profiles, but to send the documents to their partners in preparation for the next step: recording their stories as podcasts that they will later post online. Now the boy with the gambling vampire has changed his mind: “How about he marries John Lennon, and turns into Yoko Ono! Yes! Yes!” he says. “And he likes gambling!” A group of girls in the corner decides that the toddler has been transported to a tropical island, and is asking the parrot how to get home. In pairs, the students get to work, arranging the images in various sequences to tell a story in the form of a play. The students pop in the thumb drives and open the folders, and the images blossom on their screens: a pair of dice, a pale and lanky teenage boy, a flower, a parrot, drums, a toddler wearing huge glasses, a tropical island. States across the nation have tried to imitate MLTI but none has yet succeeded in implementing a program like it.Īt the front of the classroom, Lisa Hogan-technology integrator and MLTI pioneer-is handing out thumb drives to each group of four students, for an exercise she calls “Five Card Flickr.” Each drive contains a folder with five photographs downloaded from the photo-sharing website’s royalty-free photo bank. Maine is the only state in America with a one-to-one laptop program, and in recent years the program has become a model of social equity and access. 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of MLTI’s one-to-one laptop initiative, a program that is now so deeply woven into our education culture that the senior class at MAHS-the first class to cycle through the program from start to finish-has never learned without it. The letters stand for Maine Learning Technology Initiative, the state program that has made these laptops available to every junior-high student in Maine, and provided them to over half of the state’s public high schools. The backgrounds of the screens vary too: a tropical cityscape far from the Maine winter a fiery blaze through which appear the words: “Whether or not you write well, write bravely.” The majority of the screens, however, look the same: gray, the acronym “MLTI” in the lower right corner. But up close are the symbols of ownership: one girl’s keypad is trimmed with stickers of ironic Disney princesses another girl’s is decorated with an oval advertising the name of her summer camp. In clusters of four, the white Apple-illuminated shells all look the same. Ararat High School, every student in the room is flipping open his or her laptop for the day. It’s just after ten in the morning on the last day of January, and in Emily Vail’s second-period sophomore English class at Mt. Maine’s one-to-one laptop initiative in action-a decade later.
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