Mention Maine, and the first thing that comes to mind isn't likely to be cutting-edge educational technology. But maybe it should be.

Last year, trying to upgrade students' digital mastery and enhance learning, the state bought laptop computers for each of its 17,000 public school seventh-graders and their teachers. Much like textbooks, the computers are lent for use both in class and at home. They have been roundly embraced by parents and students, whose research and homework habits have reportedly improved. Teachers are integrating the laptops into instruction.

The experiment cost $37 million, which includes teacher training and another set of Apple iBooks for the incoming seventh-grade class. (This year's class will take theirs to eighth grade.) In a sign of how much students value their new equipment, only about 20 of the computers were lost or stolen during the year.

In deficit-strapped California, with 472,000 seventh-graders, such an initiative is more than a little unlikely. And it's not clear how far Maine will push the program. Legislators there have yet to decide whether and how to pay for extending the laptop program to high schools.

But in its middle schools, at least, Maine is giving other states a chance to gauge the returns on that kind of investment. So far, the returns seem well worth California's attention.