Tech —

Maine negotiates to provide MacBooks to all 7–12 graders

Apple has won a multi-million dollar, four-year deal to supply every middle …

Many school districts have initiated programs to put MacBooks in the hands of students to engage them in technology and incorporate it in the learning process. But no program is as big or as inclusive as the state of Maine's—the Maine Learning Technology Initiative has just negotiated a deal with Apple to provide MacBooks to every middle- and high-schooler in the state.

The MLTI program began earlier this decade with a program to supply every 7th and 8th grader in Maine with an iBook. The success of the program prompted the state to expand it to include all Maine high school students as well. That expansion includes a deal with Apple to supply another 64,000 MacBooks to the roughly 37,000 already in circulation—with another 7,000 expected to be ordered within the next few weeks. Apple will include educational software, professional development for educators, and technical support in exchange for approximately $25 million per year for a total of four years.

"Laptops have been shown to engage our students, and initial research shows they improve student achievement, particularly in writing," said Maine Department of Education Commissioner Susan Gendron in a statement. "The laptops will become powerful tools at the high school level, providing increased access to information, a powerful tool for simulations and modeling and ideal for students, especially in rural schools, to take classes they would not otherwise be able to access."

Kansas, Iowa, and Louisiana have all recently joined in the MacBook fun with Maine, but the state boasts that it is the first to give all its high school students direct access to a laptop. The deal also gives Maine one of the largest deployments in a one-to-one learning technology program, topping out at over 100,000 MacBooks total, including students and educators.

The education market has always been a strong one for Apple, but it lost serious ground in the late 90s and early 2000s as budget PCs from the likes of Dell began overtaking Apple in that market. Last year Apple had surpassed Dell as the number one choice in laptops among college students. Maine's deal to significantly expand its deployment of MacBooks is a good indicator that Apple can still offer schools a serious value proposition in the K-12 market.

Channel Ars Technica