CLIFTON SCHOOLS AND OTHERS GET TECHNOLOGY AID

JOHN CHADWICK, Staff Writer
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
07-05-1998
CLIFTON SCHOOLS AND OTHERS GET TECHNOLOGY AID
By JOHN CHADWICK, Staff Writer
Date: 07-05-1998, Sunday
Section: NEWS
Edition: All Editions -- Sunday

CLIFTON -- A state grant will help teachers learn how to use the Internet to
enhance their classroom lessons.

Clifton was awarded $200,000 -- more than any other school district
in Bergen or Passaic County -- from the New Jersey Technology Literacy
Challenge Fund. The district gets $140,000, and the rest goes to
Prospect Park and a Clifton Catholic school that were listed as partners
in the grant application.

Most of Clifton's money will be used for basic or intermediate
Internet training for 750 faculty members. About 110 of those teachers
also will attend a course on how to use the Internet in the classroom.
Those teachers will convey what they learned to the rest of the staff.

School officials were jubilant, citing the grant as the perfect
complement to the $7.8 million bond referendum the city approved last
year to improve its technology program.

"Teachers have to be shown the value of the Internet -- how it can
be used in the classroom to convey the lesson at hand, and how it is the
most up-to-date source of information we have," said Helen Bistritz,
Clifton's technology coordinator, who oversaw the writing of the grant
proposal.

Bistritz said a typical way to use the Internet in class would be
to call up sites from museums in New York City to illustrate history or
art lessons.

Bistritz estimated that about 200 faculty members already know how
to use the Internet well enough for the classroom. Part of the problem
until now has been limited equipment, she said. At the city's elementary
and middle schools, there is one computer with Internet access in each
library. At the high school, there are six computers.

But that is changing. A bond issue approved last year will provide
three to five computers for every elementary classroom, media centers
with computers, CD-ROM towers, and printers for middle schools, and more
than two dozen computer labs of various sizes at the high school.

In addition, the state grant will pay for one computer linked to
the Internet for faculty lounges in each school.

The grant also will provide each teacher with an e-mail address and
will pay for a technology specialist from William Paterson College to
design a Web site for the district. The grant will also pay for
community Internet training.

In Passaic County, Bloomingdale won a $94,902 grant, and Lakeland
Regional, Wanaque, and Wayne each received $95,000.

Bergen County districts that also received $95,000 grants were:
Bergen County Special Services, Bergen County Technical Schools,
Emerson, Lodi, North Arlington, Rutherford, and Teaneck.

Wyckoff received $94,952.

Keywords: CLIFTON. SCHOOL. NEW JERSEY. ORGANIZATION. AID. COMPUTER. INTERNET

Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. All rights reserved.