HUNTERDON CENTRAL REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT

The purpose of the student one-to-one pilot program is to redesign instruction to make it more student-centered,
project-based and technology-rich, with the goal of promoting greater student engagement and higher order skill
development.
As part of this project, each of the pilot teachers participated in 12 days of summer professional development
that focused on social networking and project-based learning curriculum redesign. The end goal was to create
dynamic, engaging, student-centered lessons and units. Every department in the school has teachers that
participated in the project, and the classes selected represent all student grade levels and include a mix of
General Education, Special Education, ELL, Honors and AP courses.
Hunterdon Central’s second year of the student one-to-one pilot expanded to include 25 new teachers, bringing
the total to 42 teachers now trained and evolved in the pilot. At any given time, nearly 600 students had a
netbook computer for their use in class and at home. Almost half of the student body, 1,400 total students, has
been involved in the program during 2010-11.
To support the more than 600 new end-users, and to enable the expansion of the program, several process and
infrastructure improvements were completed. A new centralized support center, “Central Hub” was created.
Our issue tracking system was redesigned to include a real time, bar coded inventory process and an issue
resolution knowledge base. Both volunteer teachers and students, including accredited internships, were
included in the support team together with the existing information system technical staff, and workflows were
revised to achieve optimum benefits from the expanded support team.
Both the wired and wireless networks were upgraded including guest wireless to support the increased usage
demands. More than 200 wireless 'N' access points were added across the campus and both the network
backbone and connections to desktops and wireless access points were improved by a factor of 10.
Evaluation of the program included information from students, teachers, parents and staff. The evaluation took
place on a number of levels including student data, surveys, focus groups, classroom observations and budget
analysis. The data that resulted from the pilot continued to be remarkable. Students demonstrated more
improvement of the District’s key critical skills when compared to their experience in non one-to-one classes.
Teachers were enthusiastic about the effects in their classroom with 100% reporting that they would teach all of
their classes one-to-one if given the opportunity. Students overwhelmingly preferred the student one-to-one
classes to traditional classes, often citing in focus groups that they felt the learning was more genuine and more
effective.
The success of the pilot with certain sub-groups of our population has been remarkable. Individual parents and
teachers reported that the devices were so helpful to Special Education students that the IEP process was revised
to include the option of giving netbooks to students not in the pilot program. Also, the program was so effective
at addressing technological inequities endured by many of our English Language Learners that we distributed
netbooks to that population regardless of their participation in the pilot. Partnering with Counseling Services,
students in economic need, without any computer or internet access at home, have been identified and with
thehelp of Hunterdon Central’s Foundation donations, we have provided these students with netbooks and
internet modems.
As technology capabilities continue to evolve, the hand held computer device market now has a large cadre of
excellent learning devices for students, teachers and parents to consider for their use. This changing opportunity
required us to revise and redefine our student one-to-one computing approach, shifting from school provided
netbooks, to leveraging student owned computers as our optimal set of possible resources for students to use to
enhance their learning.
To prepare for the use of student-owned devices on campus, we have successfully piloted allowing guest access
to our wireless network while still maintaining District internet filtering. To prepare for outside of school access
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