Customer overview
Suffern High School is located in the Ramapo Central District in New York, and has an enrolment of some 1600 students. The school offers a university program which helps students qualify for entry into university or college by providing them with the possibility of getting up to 8 college credits from the language program.

Wanted: a Language Program with a Difference
The Superintendent of the School District encouraged Suffern language teacher Joseph McKee, who had been a teacher for 32 years, 5 of them with Suffern High School. He set out to develop Suffern High School’s language program to stand out from others available in the district.

Technology has Finally Caught Up
Joseph McKee investigated a dozen schools in the area, reviewing their digital and analog language lab systems before he chose a SANAKO Tandberg Educational solution.

A Multimedia, Multifunctional Learning Space
The Sanako Lab 300 contains many elements that made it perfectly suited to the needs of the Suffern language department. The lab is equipped to administer the AP® Test, which is used to test high school students in college-level courses, offering them the opportunity to earn college credits in selected courses while still in high school. This feature proved to be very useful for Suffern’s pre-university program, and resulted in the students posting their best-ever scores in Spanish. Interestingly, the teaching staff at Suffern have discovered that the lab is well suited to other kinds of unique activities – it’s used to teach American Sign Language, and a local historical society has used its multi-function capabilities to record the memoirs of veterans resident in the area.

Teachers Update Their Skills, Students Get Involved
Teachers and students have good reason to be enthusiastic about the new Sanako Lab 300. According to Joe McKee, teachers have found new motivation for the task of teaching a foreign language, as the lab has taught them new skills, and students work harder. “They (students) can now get in 1 hour what they got before in 3 weeks,” he declared. The lab also allows teachers to record and collect physical proof of the students’ progress for their parents. As far as the students are concerned, the new language lab provides a variety of activities that make language learning easier and more interesting: they can look at videos, listen to music, and have phone conversations with their classmates in a foreign language. “This system helps you to gain confidence and learn at your own pace,” said one student.