Revival Meeting for Tech-Weary Parents

David Thornburg, educator and futurist, clicked his way through the South Bay recently, offering parents and teachers an energetic--if not entirely original--lesson on computers and education.

The failure to involve children with technology would be nothing less than catastrophic, Thornburg averred, as he showed how the Internet could be used for everything from museum visits to homework assignments.

But the 200 technology-weary parents who spent their Friday night at a theater in the Hermosa Beach Community Center weren’t necessarily buying what has become a too-familiar line about technology’s wonders.

“The schools have computers, but students rarely have time to use them,” said Kathy Siegel of Redondo Beach. “They learn more on the computer at home.”

The event was sponsored by the South Bay Advanced Educational Technology Consortium, a partnership of 13 school districts and hundreds of area businesses who teamed up two years ago to try to bootstrap schools into the Information Age. The consortium offers schools a variety of technology resources and runs a training center, the Futures Academy, that has already helped teach more than 2,000 students and educators how to surf the Net and design pages for the World Wide Web.

“Teachers need to see what technology has to offer them, and we want to build their expectations for using [it] in the classroom,” said Pat Hosken, director of the Redondo Beach-based academy.

Thornburg was brought in to hammer that message home. The educator-cum-motivational speaker, still something of a kid at heart, works with the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose as well as several Northern California school districts and is an expert at making technology fun.

During his recent daylong visit here, Thornburg spoke to more than 1,500 people about how to navigate the unwieldy Web. The quick-witted guru grabbed the attention of teachers with one-liners like the one about how kids were wired long before the Internet.

“You can take your students to a museum in Washington, D.C., to see an exhibit of the River Seine that Renoir and Monet painted on the same day,” said Thornburg, as teachers scribbled notes, “or you can hop on the Web and take them there without leaving the classroom.”

But Maria Stieritz of Redondo Beach was concerned about the growing disparity between computer haves and have-nots--something the consortium hopes a new 50-computer lab will help address. “We should be doing more to get more students using computers more often,” said Stieritz. “We need to level the playing field between students who have access to them and students who don’t.”

Correspondent Tracy Johnson can be reached via e-mail at tracy.johnson@latimes.com