HILLSBOROUGH: Technology keeps pace with the times

School demonstrates what some money in budget item will buy

      Most of the discussion on the proposed school budget has focused on the well-struck agreement in which employees assume a greater share of their health-care costs.
   Universally, and with good reason, it’s been lauded as a model of cooperation, reasonableness and recognition of the times.
   It also clears the way for the budget to include money for classroom improvements in curriculum and equipment. If there have been chirps about the spending side of the budget, they’ve focused on administration salaries and spending on technology.
   The school district tried to diffuse the latter point the other night with a presentation by the effusive Joel Handler, director of technology. He connected a computer to the interactive projector, called up maps and programs, showed them on a whiteboard, and wielded a pen and moved fluidly from screen to screen to dazzle the few people who attended with the system’s capabilities.
   It certainly looks fun and effective as a learning tool. It guides attention to “teachable moments.” Second-grade teacher Amy Mele said pupils instantly perk up, become more engaged, absorbed and motivated. Since the work can be stored on the computer, it can be called up later or opened to be shared with students who missed the board work.
   And that’s the point. You have to break through the mindset of education being one-way talk, centered on textbooks and paper. We’re in a visual generation, one in which students gather information as much through videos as print. Just think, a student with an advanced phone can fact-check a classroom lesson within seconds of its presentation.
   There are about 20 such projectors in the district, mostly provided by money from parent groups. They are unequally dispersed; Woods Road School has 10, but Woodfern one, for instance. So, when the schools propose to buy 300 projectors over the next five years for all the schools, it’s a matter of equity and education, the administration says.
   Superintendent Jorden Schiff has called the overhead projectors “the furniture of the 21st century.” Every teacher and student should have access to them, and it shouldn’t be a matter of what side of town you live on, he said.
   There’s been little research to prove definitively that advanced technology leads to students learning more or faster. But it only seems understandable; when people are motivated, they do a better job. We all know that.