Plugged In to Better Learning : Well-crafted, engaging software can bring back the atmosphere of civilized discourse that has been missing from classrooms--and homes.

Bruce Green is a Valley boy to his core: a product of Erwin Street Elementary, Millikan Junior High, Grant High School, Cal State Northridge.

Now, after a few adventures on the East Coast, including a stint at Columbia University Teacher’s College, Green is a program designer for a top Boston publisher of educational software. Within the trade, his programs consistently win prizes for effectiveness.

He is part of a very important trend.

At a time when much discussion of public education is dominated by nostalgia for the classroom discipline of the 1950s, a revolution is going on in classrooms--one teacher at a time.

This is led by teachers who know that, in the words of MIT’s Seymour Papert, “there is a deep and abiding love affair between children and computers because children know that computers help them do more, think more and achieve more.”

Smart teachers are also finding that this technology is a great equalizer. It enables them to get better academic performance out of their students, whatever the kids’ background and language.

Washington and Wall Street have noticed. Computer-aided instruction is being promoted from sources as diverse as Fortune magazine and Al Gore. A bill introduced in Congress in May calls for a comprehensive national strategy to integrate technology into the classroom.

I talked with Green when he was in town recently. He recalled that he, like all other former L.A. schoolchildren now in their 30s, attended schools that “filled us with facts poured in as if teachers were preparing students to be ‘Jeopardy’ contestants instead of good citizens.”

Ironically, he said, he learned his Big Secret of the classroom in third grade in Van Nuys.

It had to do with building relationships.

“You never forget the impression made by your favorite teacher,” Green said. “Ms. Collons could create relationships in the classroom. It was between her and all the kids, not just me. We wanted to be involved, whatever it was--building a diorama or new math.”

Green has drawn on those long-ago memories to create a series of computer-based teaching tools entitled “Decisions, Decisions” for Tom Snyder Productions. (This Tom Snyder is an ex-teacher, not the broadcaster.) The firm specializes in products that, like the best computer or video games, engage and entertain youngsters as they teach them. Its customers are school districts, schools and teachers.

“Wheeling up the computer in front of the room will initially captivate,” Green said. “There’s a mystique. . . . But the program we designed switches the action to the kids.”

The secret, as in Ms. Collons’ class, is that they all begin to participate, initially relating to the material on the computer screen and then, following directions, tuning in to one another.

“Great classroom discussions are tough to pull off,” Green said. “The computer program gets the kids to talk about what they’ve learned.” That includes everything from math to the topics of his programs--substance abuse, prejudice and AIDS.

Another influence from his youth is that Valley families, as he put it, would eat dinner together and talk over their evening meal. “And recent studies have shown that kids who do well in school also have spent time talking with their families.”

The give and take of a discussion on any topic is missing in the typical overworked American home, so Green has set about to help teachers fill this void.

The point isn’t just to create classroom chatterboxes but to foster the civilized discourse that used to be natural but now seems to require effort.

Green’s handiwork allows the teacher to rely on the computer for the “facts,” which are presented in a way that’s as dramatic and discussion-stimulating as the best classroom performer could make it.

Green was in Los Angeles training recruits of the nonprofit Teach for America program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps for smart young men and women who have signed up to teach for two years upon graduating, often from top universities.

Teach for America provides the teachers for local school systems. The rookies meet here in the summer to learn the latest techniques before fanning out to schools in the inner cities and rural South--six weeks in L.A. instead of years in teachers’ colleges.

These schools have restricted budgets, but usually there is at least one computer. According to Green, that’s all it takes.

But Green is not a fanatic about the electronic techniques he stresses.

“I’d love to be able to say technology will revolutionize everything,” he said. “But the changes I see in education in the future have more to do with things like school-based management, smaller schools, things that foster the close relationships you lose in large institutions.”

Things the way they used to be in the Valley.