TECHNOLOGY AT BERGEN CATHOLIC Jorge Mascaró ’84, CP ‘17
Then and Now W
hen I was a freshman at BC in 1980, the idea of “technology in the classroom” did not exist. Chalk, spiral-bound note- books, and enormous textbooks were the norm. On occa- sion, one of our teachers would bring in an overhead
projector or a filmstrip, but those were few and far between as most of my classes were in the freshman wing and getting those contraptions up and down the stairs was quite a task. Additionally, with some classes having 40+ students in them, there just was not a whole lot of room for an AV cart as well. The only real piece of technology that I relied on every day was my trusty Texas Instruments scientific calculator. It was my pride and joy and I took great care of it. My parents also warned me that nothing could ever happen to that calculator. At a cost of around $50, it was a considerable investment in my education (tuition at BC in those days was around $1,000). Around my junior year, a donation was made to the school of six PET
Commodore 64 computers. We were offered an elective to learn how to code in BASIC, which I immediately jumped at. These computers did not have hard drives or even disk drives. Rather, we students carried cassette tapes around with us with the fruits of our labors stored on them. Saving and loading our programs was always a nail-biting endeavor as the cassettes were notorious for easily corrupting data. As a result, I learned at a very early age to frequently back up my work. Little did I know that those early experiences at BC would foster a lifelong love and curiosity of all things technological. Fast-forward to 2007 and my first year as a teacher at BC. The one-to-
one laptop program is in full swing and the old paper and chalk based educational system is changing. Faculty members are utilizing web-based resources to enhance the classroom experience. Projectors that were once on carts are being mounted in the ceiling and teachers are better able to use their laptops to display content to their students. Students are able to per- form research, participate in virtual labs, and even submit assignments, right from their desks. And a few times each year, there are experiments with paperless and textbook free education where faculty members are challenged to think differently about how to deliver content to their students. These early experiments helped pave the way to the Bergen Catholic of today. As we move through the second year of our two-to-one device initia- tive, the evolution of our technology based educational system continues.
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