This article is sponsored by HP Australia
A teacher’s laptop does a lot of heavy lifting these days, and as technology in education evolves, that load is only getting heavier.
Brett Salakas, who has worked in Government, Catholic and Independent schools for 28 years, understands the challenges associated with this shift better than most.
After finishing up his role as a consultant with the NSW Department of Education in April 2021, Salakas became HP Australia's Education Ambassador, where he helps schools meaningfully integrate technology into their classrooms.
It's a role that draws heavily on his own time at the front of the classroom, a career that began long before laptops, learning platforms and online portals became part of a teacher's daily routine. Looking back, Salakas says the difference between then and now is striking, particularly when it comes to the paperwork.
“I recall the days when I was a chalkie whose hand-written programs were a couple of pages long, at most. But now, the expectation on administration on teachers is phenomenally larger than when I was a teacher,” Salakas tells The Educator. “The admin was low and you’d maximise your time with students.”
Over the course of his career, that has changed significantly, says Salakas.
“When programs get printed out now, you’re talking about entire binders full of work that is representative of 8-10 weeks of work,” he says. “That is where equipping your teacher with the right type of tool comes in.”
Salakas points out that a teacher who uses an old, clunky device often spends more time on admin than in front of students.
“We need good systems, good tools, and good teachers in place – and with the right tech you can do good and amplify your good,” he says. “But we need to make sure they get great tools, because that’s what helps students be great.”
Of course, a teacher’s working day rarely happens at one desk. It moves from the classroom to the staffroom, from playground duty to a parent meeting, and often finishes at the kitchen table at home.
That's where portability counts.
The ProBook 4 G2a weighs in at 1.41kg and carries a 68Wh battery, with Wi-Fi 7 to keep teachers connected as they move around the school.
Then there's the multitasking. On any given day, a teacher might have a lesson up on the board, a half-written report sitting in the background and the school's learning platform open in another tab. With configurations offering up to 64GB of DDR5 memory, the device is designed to support the multitasking that comes with a busy school day. Those few seconds of lag might not seem like much, but they add up over a day, and they come straight out of class time.
A laptop that walks the talk
But a great tool isn't measured by speed and power alone. For a growing number of schools, many of which are teaching students about climate change and sustainable living, what a device is made from and where it ends up matter just as much as what it can do in the classroom.
Sustainability continues to be an important consideration in HP’s approach to product design, helping schools make technology choices that support their own environmental goals and targets.
The HP ProBook 4 G2a is one example of this approach, incorporating a range of sustainability-focused features and materials, as outlined in HP’s product data sheets.
At least half of the ProBook 4 G2a’s speaker enclosure is made from ocean-bound plastic, and the aluminium cover contains at least 50% post-industrial recycled aluminium. The keycaps use at least 50% post-consumer recycled plastic, and the device even arrives in 100% sustainably sourced, paper-based packaging.
From Apollo 11 to the staffroom
Still, sustainability is only part of the story. What sits inside the device matters too, and some of the ProBook 4 G2a's most useful features for teachers have roots in a place few would expect: one of the most famous moments in the history of space exploration.
Poly, which HP acquired in 2022, was launched in 1961 as Pacific Plantronics. The company designed the MS50 headset, which was adapted into the communications assembly inside the "Snoopy cap" worn by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
Salakas says HP also played a part in the space race by bringing its hard-won reputation for quality and accuracy to the U.S effort against the Soviet Union. Its instruments helped design and launch the missions that put humans on the Moon in 1969, proving the company's technology could perform when failure simply wasn't an option.
“Today, that same engineering pedigree is in HP's devices,” Salakas says. “This includes the Poly Studio audio, dual microphones and AI noise reduction built into the ProBook 4 G2a.”
The smarts behind the screen
For teachers, the benefits of that pedigree are most obvious when a lesson moves online, or a guest speaker joins via video. Salakas says much of the smart work behind the scenes is handled by the device's AMD Ryzen processor, and it's done in a way many educators may not expect.
“When educators think about AI, they might think about having to go into the cloud and come back, from your PC to the cloud and back, but the Ryzen chip can do something that’s called ‘AI on the edge’, where it happens on the PC and doesn’t require the cloud,” Salakas says.
“If I have an author in the classroom and I set up a Teams meeting for a Q&A with an author, we can set up an ‘acoustic fence’ in Teams with the Poly tools where the AI automatically filters out the background noise. So, in a noisy environment, there’s just the teacher or author speaking. It allows for a clearer conversation within the acoustic zone.”
Video calls get a lift, too. The optional 5MP HDR camera delivers a sharper, more evenly lit picture, which comes in handy in classrooms where sunlight from the windows clashes with the fluorescent lights overhead. So, when students meet an author over video, or a teacher sits down for a parent-teacher interview or a staff meeting with another campus, nobody is left squinting at a grainy, washed-out face.
Security that doesn't bend
If Salakas could pull up a chair with every Principal in the country before next year's device budget is signed off, his message would be simple. Some things will change in the next five years. Others shouldn't.
“I think there a couple of key unchangeable things,” Salakas says. “Schools need a device that has the right kind of security, because while all tools are getting better, there are nefarious people getting access to these advanced tools as well.”
Salakas says schools need to ensure their students and teachers are safe from cyberthreats.
“The security environment should be second to none,” he says. “Think of a company that has 2,000 employees on a single network. That would be a multi-billion-dollar company,” he says, adding that some schools are no different to these companies in terms of the number of people learning and working within them.
“At the end of the day, we’re talking about the welfare of our next generation, so we need to make sure we have the right security keeping our students safe.”
Salakas says the ProBook 4 G2a is embedded with HP Wolf Security for Business, which he calls “the best possible security setting” that HP offers for a school device.
“If a student goes on to a phishing site, the security feature immediately grabs it and isolates it,” Salakas explains. “From a technical point of view, the mantra should always be ‘think safety, think security’.”
The feature protects PCs and printers from hardware to the cloud by trapping risky links and attachments in secure containers. The device not only repairs itself after firmware attacks, but also uses AI to catch new malware, and lets IT teams locate, lock or wipe devices remotely – even non-HP ones.
Buying for tomorrow's classroom, not today's
Salakas says the second non-negotiable is a device that won't be left behind.
“We know that administrative workloads in Australia’s schools are growing, so it’s about making sure you have a tool that is powerful enough to handle what is coming, not just today,” he says. “Schools also have finite resources, so you want value for your device.”
Continued advancements in AI should also be on the radar of teachers and leaders, says Salakas, noting that this technology has been shown to free up substantial time for busy educators.
“There is lots of research showing that AI is used most commonly by teachers, not students, and it’s to reduce the administrative burden,” he says. “So, a big question moving forward is what can AI do? Do we have a device that can handle the tools that teachers will require in the coming years?”
Salakas says the biggest win for AI is in supporting teachers, because it “frees them up to do what they always have wanted to do.”
In one study cited in the OECD’s Digital Education Outlook 2026 report, secondary science teachers reduced lesson planning time by 31% using AI tools.
“That is a huge signal about where generative AI may have its biggest immediate impact: freeing teachers to focus on relationships and learning,” Salakas says. “That’s 31% of time they can dedicate to teaching.”
Salakas says this highlights the importance of teachers identifying “the right tool for the right job”.
“To me, the ProBook 4 G2a strikes the right balance,” he says. “This is a device that can do 80-90% of what happens in a school environment, so from a value for money perspective, it is the most investment-wise, pedagogically sound device a school can have.”
Teachers are being asked to do more every year, and the laptops they lug from room to room are under the same strain. For schools wanting to give staff a device that won't hold them back, the HP ProBook 4 G2a powered by AMD pairs strong performance with intelligent features built around the way teachers work.