800 Educators View Classroom of Future at Computer Course : Thousand Oaks: Participants investigate the latest technology to aid decisions on spending schools’ limited improvement funds.

Thousand Oaks schoolchildren may someday run science experiments with students in other states and countries, routinely swapping information via computer modem.

They may be able to research, write and publish books, study great works of art, or design buildings using a personal computer. Labs with miniature solar-powered windmills and alternative fuel engines may replace books as a means of introducing youngsters to the latest technologies.

Nearly 800 Thousand Oaks educators attending an all-day conference on Monday glimpsed how the classroom of the future may be transformed by computers and other technology, just as society already has been changed.

The teachers and administrators converged on Westlake High School to sample everything from basic word processing to sophisticated links connecting teachers across state and national boundaries.

The time has arrived for public schools to join the computer age, said Rich Acton, a Westlake High School math teacher who helped to organize the conference.

“This is where education is going,” Acton said. “We’re just trying to keep up.”

The conference was intended to familiarize teachers with the latest educational technology so they can make informed choices about how individual schools should spend limited improvement funds, said Fred Van Leuven, the district’s director of secondary education.

“A school may not be able to buy the Cadillac of equipment right now, but they can take this information to do some long-range planning,” Van Leuven said.

Many teachers unfamiliar with computers, modems and software do not realize that the machinery can make their classroom livelier and their workload lighter, said Don Goetzinger, a science teacher at Thousand Oaks High School who led one of many educational sessions at the conference.

Goetzinger and Craig Fox, a science teacher at Redwood Intermediate School, are the only Thousand Oaks teachers who dial up other educators worldwide to share ideas through a computer program called LabNet.

With high-quality information flowing back and forth between teachers, logging on and asking for help is like attending an educational conference without ever leaving school, Goetzinger and Fox said.

“This thing is so valuable to me as a teacher that if the school didn’t pay for it, I’d buy it,” Goetzinger said.

Many teachers blame a lack of money or their comfort with traditional methods for their failure to incorporate common technology in their classrooms, Goetzinger said.

“They have excuses, but it’s just discomfort,” Goetzinger said. “Change is painful.”

Once teachers get excited about technology, they often can find private, corporate and government grants to help purchase equipment, Acton said.

Teachers praised the conference for the variety of information available, although some complained that there was not enough time to hear everything they wanted to learn about.

Others said it was frustrating to see what could be done with more money. Beth Anderson, a Thousand Oaks High School English teacher, said she planned to spend more than $150 of her own money to buy computer tutorials.

“Anything I can get my hands on makes me so excited, I can’t wait to get to the classroom and say, ‘Look what I found!’ ” Anderson said.

Students will need to be familiar with computers when they enter the working world and schools have not kept pace, Anderson said.

“We have to catch the wind, so to speak,” she said. “We’re already behind.”