The school district in Van Meter, Iowa has ditched their workbooks and replaced them with MacBooks in a four-year digital learning experiment.
John Carver, Superintendent of the Van Meter school district in Iowa, has taken a bold move into the realm of digital learning. In the 2009-2010 school year, the district handed out laptops to all its seventh to twelfth grade students. The school district signed a four-year lease agreement with Apple to provide the students with MacBook laptops. The program costs about US$149,000 per year and is funded by the district's Physical Plant and Equipment Levy (PPEL) and School Infrastructure Local Option (SILO) tax. It hopes to have the funds to extend this program to K-12 students by t