Maine High School Teacher Training on MacBooks in Full Swing

Macs Only! broke the story in July, at least among Mac news Web sites, that Apple had won another large notebook contract with the State of Maine this year. This time the Maine Learning Technology Initiative project was for teachers and administrators at all of the state's high schools and career and technical education centers and for MacBooks rather than iBooks. While the Maine Department of Education had budgeted for Dell laptops, Apple got the contract for MacBooks instead.

The full delivery of Macbooks for all high school teachers and administrators will be next month according to The Times Record, but due to the need to be up to speed when school starts, administrators and teachers are going to "summer school" to learn how to best use the MacBooks, software and wireless networks.

Featured are three-way video conferencing and nine-way audio conferencing using the built-in iSight cameras along with the usual burning of optical disks and movie-making using iMovie. The teachers and administrators are also receiving an education in computer sociology involving the changing world that students face, including such facts as that 70 percent of 4-year-olds in the U.S. have in some way used a computer, 12 percent of U.S. couples met on line and the population of visitors of MySpace.com is the size of the world's eighth largest country.

That's the latest from the most Mac-centric state in the Union. [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]