NASHUA — Katie Scurrah's 26 fourth-grade students rose one by one, their classmates applauding as each approached the front of the gym for a laptop computer.

School board member Dennis Ryder clapped and smiled as the Amherst Street Elementary School students received their machines, donated to the school by Dell.

Ryder qualified himself as a science fiction fanatic, and thinks it's about time the world's leader in technology begins implementing it in the classroom.

“After all these years of developing this stuff, we're finally starting to use it,” he said. “The rest of the world's been using it quite a lot longer than us.”

The computers were donated under Dell's Powering the Possible program through Digital Wish, a Vermont-based nonprofit that assists schools in developing 1-to-1 student-computer classrooms.

Digital Wish entered the Granite State for the first time on a separate grant last year, providing 26 computers to a class at Bicentennial School. This time, a class at both Mt. Pleasant and Amherst Street schools got laptops, in addition to an innovative curriculum that has been implemented in 30 districts in Vermont.

After each kid got their computer, Digital Wish's Eric Bird gave a tutorial on how to use them. Mayor Donnalee Lozeau and Superintendent Mark Conrad joined 26 volunteers from Dell, who provided the kids with one-on-one help.

Bird will visit the schools weekly to help with the computers and the units offered by Digital Wish. The first unit, Digital Citizenship, deals with navigating the Internet appropriately and being a responsible online citizen.

“We feel that digital citizenship is perhaps the most important thing that we could ever teach,” Bird said, “to make sure that the students are aware how to be good citizens online, as much as they are in the real world.”

The computers will be integrated into core subjects when possible, for example, when a presentation is to be made. The kids will turn much of their work into presentable material, through things like wikis, podcasts, blogs and videos, posting them on the school's website.

Bird said the use of technology greatly boosts students' engagement in class as well as their ability to collaborate with each other.

“Students see using tech as applicable to the world that they live in,” he said. “They want their education to apply to what they're going to face when they graduate.”

The program includes instruction for teachers as well, so when the program is finished they are able to continue teaching the Digital Wish units.

Mrs. Scurrah's class, one of three fourth-grade classes at the school, was selected to receive the computers as part of the grant application process.

Amherst St. School currently has a netbook cart with 25 netbooks, in addition to some 30 desktops in the computer lab and 10 iPads. Principal Jennifer Scarpati said the Dell donation goes a long way towards equipping the school with the ideal number of computers, though she'd like to see a computer in the hands of every fourth and fifth grade student.

Asked if it's unfair that only one of the school's three fourth-grade classes are getting computers, she said all the kids have access the same programs through the computer lab and netbook cart. But once this program is wrapped up, the school could apply for additional grants.

Scarpati said the donation from Dell signifies a win-win situation for the company and the school. “They get to see what's going on in the community, they get to build and enhance the skills (of) future workers.”Eric Schott, an executive at Dell in Nashua, was one of the volunteers who came to help out. “I'm just really impressed with what the kids do and learn, and how hard the teachers work to adjust their curriculums,” he said. “It's not just a computer in the library; they're actually using them day-to-day in classroom education.”

An additional part of the program consists of an after-school program at both schools. Dell employees will share their expertise in the program, which aims to increase community involvement through technology.

srios@newstote.com