Now she can leave them alone for some 15 minutes - others can manage completely on their own. Students learn better from their peers. The teacher also learns. Teachers and students can be very insulated in their classrooms. The lab opens up the world to all of them.
Teachers have more time for individual contact with students.
Before the lab opened Masconomet had offered all the preliminary technology professional development workshops on word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and Internet research and got only fair attendance - nothing had changed curriculum wise, there was really no increased demand for equipment. The year the lab opened Linda offered a workshop on creating web pages - and did it twice for a total of about 20 teachers. About half of those teachers developed a sincere interest in creating curriculum to be posted to the web. We arranged for them to get stipends to continue the work over the summer which provided some teacher-created work to share with other teachers. Out of 20 that was not too bad and the original twenty were still interested in going forward.