Though some critics have recently questioned the value of technology in schools, Sam Sanders, superintendent of LaRue County Public Schools in Kentucky, saw an opportunity to improve instruction.

Sanders said his district, which serves 2,500 students, started looking at One-to-One Computing back in 2008, and officials made four site visits to other schools in Kentucky to see how it was working.

“When we saw the student engagement and we saw what was happening in those other districts, we were ready at that point to move forward,” he said in a YouTube video.

But that wasn’t the only reason the district proceeded.

“The professional development piece IS the reason we chose Dell. Our staff has really taken that professional development and taken how they teach to be able to use the laptop as a tool to enhance learning,” Sanders said.

And officials and teachers don’t see laptops as a replacement for traditional teaching methods. The computers simply complement student learning.

“It’s incredibly important to have the laptops around,” Eric Cecil, a chemistry teacher at LaRue County High School, said. “It makes me much more effective as a teacher in that I can do many different types of things as far as the activities we do, the labs we do.”

The sophistication of the labs allows students to do more hands-on activities and give them a taste of what they’ll see at the college level or beyond.

As high school student Zachary Lee said, “We have lab equipment and sensors that actually hook up to the laptops and graph the data in real time. It helps us to analyze our data more quickly, and actually adjust the lab as we’re doing it to so that we can get better data throughout the lab.”

And working with the laptops evolves with the district’s education needs.

 “We’re continuing, even as we’ve already rolled the laptops out, we’re still learning how to do new things with them,” Cecil said. “We’re getting feedback from the students as we find what works, what doesn’t work, what needs to work differently.”

“It’s much more fun than just standing around listening to teachers talk or writing down notes off the board,” Cecil said. “I really wish that I could’ve had the same opportunities that we’re giving these kids today.”

And word of LaRue County’s success is spreading. The district has been featured on the Kentucky Education Television (KET) series “Education Matters,” which aired in September.