District 80, in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, will soon be providing every teacher and student in grades 3-8 with a laptop for educational use.  This is being made possible by a $658,000 grant from the Illinois State Board of Education’s “Children’s Low-Cost Laptop Program.”

The grant is the largest competitive grant awarded as part of the program, according to Mt. Vernon superintendent Kevin Settle. The district will purchase a mix of Windows-based laptops and Android-based mobile devices -- more than 1,000 machines, in total. Settle said the use of the computers will likely operate like textbook rental, where students will pay a small insurance fee and then be able to take the computer home. The district’s wireless Internet infrastructure is being updated to support the new technology.

All the teachers will receive professional development to help them prepare for the new style of teaching made possible by one-to-one computing. The district is also hiring a technology coach who will visit the classrooms, talk to the students and prepare them. And there is no desire to leave the students in K-2 out of the 21st century; the district is also adding three mobile labs, each with 25 laptops for students to use.

District 80 is creating an Instructional Change Team to oversee the new 1:1 program. According to assistant superintendent Tyler Brown, their professional development efforts go far beyond training people to use the technology. “We’ve had a lot of tech grants in the past that were essentially deployment grants,” Brown said. “This grant is not that. This is money for infrastructure and computers, and the training is on how you utilize the computers for student learning. Now, how do you change the way you teach? That’s the focus. ... It’s our teachers who will make it a success.”