Holy Cross High School in Delran, Pennsylvania, has recently joined the number of schools that are providing all their students with laptop computers to do their work at school and at home. Holly Jobe, an education consultant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, anticipates that this is the wave of the future. "It will become even more widespread as computing and computing tools become more ubiquitous and less expensive. A computer is a thinking tool. You wouldn't send a student to school without a pen and paper."

Throughout Pennsylvania there is a wide variety of private and public schools that have been involved in one-to-one education, some since the 1990s. According to the most recent America's Digital Schools report, there are about 6,000 schools in the U.S. that are involved with one-to-one programs. Many of them allow allows students to take the computers home at night for 24/7 access.

Some public school districts in Pennsylvania received a jump-start on the process through their participation in Classrooms for the Future, the now-defunct grant initiative that helped schools update classroom technology. In the state's public schools today, funding for one-to-one programs comes from district budgets and, in some cases, private grants. Officials in the Upper Merion Area School District, for instance, have allotted $475,000 per year to lease MacBooks for 1,100 high school students and 100 teachers. Families contribute by paying a $55 insurance fee.

At Springside School in Philadelphia, where laptops were recently issued to students, one of the school's teachers, Christy Yaffee, sums things up as follows: "This is the direction that the world is moving in. So let's figure out the best way to let these kids go at it."

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, More Schools Opening Door to Technology by Kristin Holmes