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.

See the entire article on Union Leader's website here: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20121020/NEWS04/710209995