"Anytime, Anywhere Learning" was coined by Microsoft way back in 1995, yet despite exponential advances in technology and drastic price reductions, we're still falling sadly short of that dream 14 years later.

That is, most of us are.

From computer access to software quality to Internet connectivity to high speed to wireless, the digital divide's newest defining characteristic is 24/7 access to a personal computing device. So if you are not at least beginning to consider one-to-one for your school or district, you're heading for the wrong side of the divide.

When Australia's Methodist Ladies' College in Melbourne rolled out the first one-to-one program back in 1990, the world watched with curious eyes. It seemed a luxury, a dream available only to a privileged, wealthy few. Five years later the Anytime, Anywhere Learning initiative reached American shores, with 30 lucky schools partnering up with Microsoft and Toshiba to make laptops possible for each student and educator. Early studies of these programs showed increased student attendance and motivation, expanded curricular offerings, and a leap in educator technology savvy.

However positive, such findings did not provide the "hard" evidence many districts required to commit the substantial time and money resources they'd need to implement such programs. Moreover, with the new layer of state and federal reporting demands instituted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001, technology funds in districts across the country were being siphoned off for the data management systems just needed to keep up. For a time, one-to-one seemed put on hold in favor of administrative uses of technology for schools.

But laptop, table, and other one-to-one programs did not go away. In fact, the past few years have seen a major resurgence of the trend, with a wave of national reports and studies, the founding of the One-to-One Institute, mainstream media announcements of high-profile district-vendor partnerships, and a plethora of public, private, and statewide initiatives.

Today, there are a number of large-scale initiatives—mostly laptop and tablet—in the U.S. According to the American's Digital Schools Survey 2006, 24 percent of all school districts with student populations of 2,500 and up had begun or were planning to implement one-to-one programs.

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