A school district in the Seattle, Washington area is world renowned for increasing the achievement of its students as a result of its top-rated one-to-one initiative.

A one-to-one initiative or program is simply a school's dedication to providing every student with his or her own device, whether that device be a laptop, iPad, or the like. Because of budgetary restrictions, one-to-one initiatives can be too costly for most schools to implement.

But the Kent School District (KSD), the fourth largest school district in Washington, began its road to supplying one-to-one laptops in 2005 and hasn't looked back since.

Much credit goes to Thuan Nguyen, the district’s chief digital strategy officer, who "helped implement a series of tech-related initiatives for the district, perhaps most notably the one-to-one program that provides a laptop to more than 13,000 students for the entire school year, covering each secondary student in the district," according to an article on GeekWire.com.

Since launching its pilot program in 2005, KSD "is recognized as one of the top one-to-one initiatives in the nation by Project RED, a non-profit that studies the effectiveness of education technology implementation. The laptops provide a way for students to do homework, check email, log into learning management systems, and access more than 300 applications."

Educators throughout the school district have noticed a difference. Becky Keene has worked in the KSD for over 14 years, and has directly seen the change in students before and after the initiative. In her classrooms, "'[t]here are fewer behavioral problems, and increases in homework completion and school attendance. It’s sort of amazing to see the side effects when technology is involved,'" she said according to the article.

The KSD is proof of a one-to-one initiative that works during a time when the benefits of one-to-one have been debated. Recently, the benefits of students having individual iPads as opposed to sharing has come into question, but could certainly be in part because of difficulties with the actual product. 

Read the full article here and comment below.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

4/16/2015