A growing number of districts in these Iowa and Illinois communities are adopting laptop programs in the hope of narrowing the equity gap and preparing students for the 21st century.

The Quad-City area straddles the Mississippi, incorporating communities in Iowa and Illinois. According to the Quad-City Times, school districts in the area are in various phases of one-to-one integration. For example:

• In Erie, Illinois, the district is in its third year of one-to-one computing, with students from K-12 participating.

• The Maquoketa Community School District in Iowa has purchased several hundred new laptops that it plans to roll out to all of its high school students by November.

• Iowa’s Bettendorf Community School District is in the "research phase" of a similar initiative for the high school. If it succeeds, Bettendorf would be one of the first of its size in the state to implement the program.

• The Durant Community School District (also in Iowa) announced an initiative that equips third- through 12th-grade students with MacBooks and kindergarten through second-grade students with iPads.

• North Scott High School in Eldridge, Iowa, has issued 225 new Lenovo ThinkPads to teachers and students in this year’s freshman class.

Despite the "often-prohibitive cost—about $1 million for a K-12 program in the 700-student Durant Community School District,” the article reports that approximately a quarter of schools in Iowa are expected to have a one-laptop-per-student program in place by 2012.

Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass suggests that the state's progress into one-to-one computing is unique in that it has been driven by district administrators rather than state-level requirements.

"The state of Iowa is what I would consider a national leader in education technology," Glass said. "A lot of it has to do with the courage that we've seen a lot of the Iowa districts have in working on this one-to-one initiative."

North Scott and other schools in the Quad-City area are hoping that the one-to-one initiative will help narrow the achievement gap between its low-socio-economic-status students and everyone else. "We have a gap, and we haven't narrowed that gap close enough," said principal Shane Knoche. "A lot of the data out there shows that this gap has closed with one-to-one schools because we're providing them with an opportunity that they wouldn't normally get. It acts as an equalizer because now the kids can utilize the same tools to complete projects."

Maquoketa schools Superintendent Kim Huckstadt expressed similar reasons for embracing one to one. "We have roughly 50 percent of our students on free and reduced lunch, and so we have a number of students that come from a low (socio-economic-status) background," Huckstadt said. "We felt we'd be leveling the playing field for many of our students."

To Learn More: Quad-City area schools plug into a wired world, The Quad-City Times