Smithtown educator Tim Needles brings his love of tech and art to the job

Some people have a talent for art. Others are comfortable using the latest technology. Tim Needles is good at both.

Needles, an art teacher for many years, is a technology integration specialist for the Smithtown Central School District. His job is to stay on top of advances like artificial intelligence and virtual reality and train the district’s educators to apply them in the classroom.

Needles’ job also includes producing weekly five-minute videos on tech topics. He comes up with the topics — sometimes with suggestions from his fellow teachers — and produces the videos in which students sometimes appear.

“AI is new for everyone, and he has been in the forefront of that for Smithtown,” said John Nolan, Smithtown Central’s director of information & technology services.

Needles, 50, has been with the district for 26 years. He said his role is still evolving and that he enjoys the more traditional aspects of teaching.

“It grows with my time in the job, which is great,” he said.

Needles pointed to an ongoing project he is working on in which, as part of a lesson about water quality on Long Island, students paint murals on storm drains.

“It’s nice because it becomes a project that students come back to see,” he said.

For the teachers Needles instructs, they walk away from his presentations with practical tools they can apply right away, said Paul McNeil, principal at Smithtown High School East.

“His understanding of emerging technologies in the district is second to none,” McNeil said.

Needles, who lives in Sound Beach, wrote “STEAM Power: Infusing Art Into Your STEM Curriculum,” for which he also illustrated the book and its cover, and is at work on a second book on technology and education.

In 2024, Needles received a Making It Happen award from the International Society for Technology in Education. He said he is on top of the evolving world of technology. “We’re in a world where technology is moving quicker than ever before,” he said.

Needles is also an artist, filmmaker and animator. He holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he studied photography. And he likes to draw. A lot.

“I have a sketchbook and I’m drawing all the time,” he said.

Before transitioning into the technology specialist role three years ago, Needles taught art classes for years including cartooning, illustration and fashion design.

He said he sought the change because he thought he could put his tech skills to work for teachers during the pandemic and he wanted a different challenge.

Needles was recognized recently by the New York State Art Teachers Association, which named him its 2025 Art Educator of the Year.

“That was pretty unexpected,” he said of the award, which was announced at the group’s annual conference in Binghamton last November.

One of Needles’ most high-profile projects is the video “Four Freedoms Today,” which he produced as part of an exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In the video, Needles asked 40 people what Rockwell’s iconic paintings “Four Freedoms” mean to them. The “Four Freedoms” are a series Rockwell painted in 1943, at the height of World War II, depicting the four basic human rights of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want that President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked in a 1941 speech to Congress.

In addition to his talent behind the camera, Needles has a way with words. He’s an actor and has done stand-up comedy and storytelling events. And, as Nolan said, “He’s an all around nice person. We like him.”

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