In an op-ed that appeared in the March 20 New York Times entitled “Lectures vs. Laptops,” Yale Law professor Ian Ayres complained that his students believed that they were entitled to use their laptops to play solitaire and surf the Web during his class.

And while no JDS teacher has reported such an irksome confrontation of pedagogical and technological worlds, JDS has not been immune to the incursions of the virtual world into the classroom.

Faculty and staff school e-mail addresses are among the technological developments implemented in the Upper School this past year, leading to “a lot more e-mailing back and forth amongst the faculty,” according to Assistant Principal Laura Jacobs.

The e-mail system was intended to enhance the contact between students and teachers, as faculty become more open to receiving e-mails and voicemails from the students, according to Jacobs.

However, 80 percent of students report that they rarely or never communicate with their teachers via e-mail.

In addition to the new e-mail system, televisions that can be hooked up to computers and a computerized attendance system have been installed throughout the building and have met with much success, Jacobs said.

“The computerized attendance system is a lot easier and a lot less time consuming. It allows us to track kids better and faster,” said Director of Technology Ted Besch.

“This job will be made even easier once the system is perfected, the ultimate goal being to replace the empty attendance boxes on the screen with pictures of every student,” Besch added.

However, a teacher with 17 years of teaching experience who responded anonymously to a Lion’s Tale survey wrote, regarding the increasing automation of record-keeping, that “the newly unveiled process for doing academic progress reports on the computer is enormously time consuming and a waste of time. It also ties us to the computer screen. We cannot do them during the odd times of day when we may not have access to a computer.”

Although many wholly new additions have been made to the school’s technology, the year also saw an increase in the use of basic computer programs such as Power Point, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.

Providing a telling example, Jacobs said, “Before, science fair projects were sloppier, but now kids do gorgeous presentations on their computers.”

The tech bug has also infected teachers when planning their lessons and projects.

“I think that technology allows me to make my presentations multi-media, which is flexible and can be changed according to the questions the students raise,” said History Department Chair Dr. David Kobrin.

Eleven percent of survey respondents reported that their teachers frequently rely on computer software or on the Internet in classroom instruction. Thirty-two percent reported that their teachers sometimes do so and 37 percent reported that their teachers rarely or never do so.

“A large part of education in history is that in the past, teachers were the ones who knew the historical content better than anybody else because they spent time studying and thinking about it. But now, with the Internet and CD-ROMs, it’s possible for high school students to access that information for themselves,” Kobrin added.

Indeed, 97 percent of teachers who responded to the survey reported that they believe that the teaching profession requires a good comfort-level with computer technology. Of those, 69 percent reported that this is more the case today than when they first entered the teaching profession.

Some departments, however, have been disappointed by the over-reliance of students on classroom technology.

“Students abuse calculators much more than they use them. They use them for arithmetic rather than for investigation,” said Math Department Chair Christian Citarella, explaining why the department discourages calculator use.

“Too often, students use their calculators as a crutch,” agreed math teacher Karen Snow.

“I think many students today don’t have as good a ‘number sense’ or comfort with trigonometic functions and logarithms as students did before calculators were so widespread. Often, kids can’t find ‘half of 34’ or ‘nine times 12’ without reaching for their calculators, and I think that’s sad,” said Snow.

Even so, the Math Department is currently supplementing its curricula with computer software, such as Geometer’s Sketch Pad, and is also attempting to “use more software for doing investigations and to use the graphing capabilities of computers,” said Citarella.

The proliferation of software tools has prompted the offering of new technology courses for both students and teachers.

Students taking technology are now offered the opportunity to learn networking in addition to the programming languages. This year, for the first time, the elective has been offered to seventh graders, who are learning HTML as well as working to take a computer apart and putting it back together, according to technology teacher Lisa Cohen.

A variety of courses are offered to teachers to better acquaint them with new technologies.

“Whenever we put in a new software package, we train [the faculty] in the beginning of the school year in a formal classroom setting,” Besch said. “And after the formal setting, we offer them the option of individual training .”

This year, the training focused primarily on teaching the faculty to use the attendance, e-mail and grading systems, as well as how to use the Hebrew version of Microsoft Word installed this year, according to Besch.

However, there is no computer literacy requirement for teachers, according to Jacobs, and even the courses offered are not able to fully alleviate certain teachers’ discomfort with using technology and others’ dissatisfaction with the existing level of training.

“There are teachers who are on the Internet all the time doing a lot of research, but there are teachers who hardly use [the Internet] at all and are very uncomfortable using the grading program,” Jacobs said.

Kobrin highlighted the evolution of teachers’ needs over the past decade, saying, “My concern for teachers is that we need equipment, access and training, which weren’t necessary ten years ago.”

Jewish History Department Chair Cynthia Peterman agreed: “The school has made a real commitment to the purchase and educational use of technology equipment. However, without the training of teachers and support of their work, the technology cannot be put to its full use.”

Peterman indicated specific areas where she would like to see improvement. “Time and financial resources need to be put to more staffing in the Technology Department, ongoing training opportunities for teachers and opportunities for teachers to learn from one another about successful uses of technology in the classroom,” she said.

Ready availability of computers is also a concern.

“I believe there is a serious need for more computers for teachers in departmental offices because many teachers share classrooms, which limits access to classroom computers,” said guidance counselor Ilana Weisel. “It seems many teachers are not using electronic communications as frequently as I believe would benefit how we all function, simply because they don’t have the access and are rightfully concerned about confidentiality issues, which precludes using more public computers such as the library or labs.”

History teacher Dana Capell sees the access problem extending to classroom instruction.

“So many teachers have begun integrating computers into their curricula that the demands on the computer lab have grown. It has made it so that you cannot really count on access to the labs,” she said.

But when increased access equals increased reliance on tools like the Internet, teachers must consider policies to ensure the validity of the information students find.

“I am delighted that students use [the Internet] so heavily as long as they can distinguish between information they find that is credible and that which is not,” Jacobs said.

Kobrin added, “When students go online, they need to be focused on the task because [the Internet] can take you to different, inappropriate sites.” Therefore, although students are encouraged to use the technological tools offered, the increasing use of technology also raises ethical concerns.

“The only difficulty [of taking tests on the computers] is that it could lead to academic dishonesty,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs is equally aware, however, of the other side of the question.

“If you’re not allowed to use a computer [for a test], it is almost like asking you to switch hands,” she said.

But the biggest question mark is just how much more “techified” the JDS classroom will become.

According to Kobrin, the History Department would like to make a switch from using actual textbooks to using textbooks on CD-ROMs, which it was not yet able to accomplish because not all students had access to CD-ROMs at home.

While 47 percent of students favor replacing paper-textbooks with CD-ROM, only three percent of teachers favor the change.

Among other future plans is the creation of a school “Intranet.” The Intranet will be a mini-Internet of linked school-wide web-pages.

The system will provide on-line school forms as well as department web pages, according to Besch, and will be developed over the next two years.

The teacher who responded anonymously to the survey had a word of caution for those who would wholeheartedly embrace the creation of an automated, online, “virtual” classroom:

“The human mind is greater than the machines it creates, more subtle, more creative and capable of far more sophisticated associational processes. I would rather train that mind to reach its full potential than teach it to rely on technological crutches.”