Placing technology into schools without emphasizing associated changes in methodology and curriculum , is a futile venture that will not propel schools into the 21st century but freeze them in current practices. Inservice staff development programs need to be comprehensive, immersive and effective to cause the social and knowledge changes needed to produce creative adoption of information technologies in the schools of tomorrow. This paper will discuss a two and four week immersive summer training model that has been developed through an iterative design process to empower teachers to take advantage of information technologies. The model has been effectively used to train teachers to become savvy users of the Internet and demonstrate the integration of these technologies into everyday teaching activities. Teachers were trained to be informed consumers and inventive producers of learning experiences on the Internet.
Surveys indicate high satisfaction with the content and the intensiveness of the training model.
Training models need to reduce the learning curve by creating immersive environments for computing and emphasizing the application and retention of skills gained in training. These issues, that are of increasing importance as more school districts move toward integration of information technologies, will be the primary focus of the paper. The training model discussed in this paper was initially implemented in the GirlTECH project described below and then further compressed through an iterative design process for implementation in the OWLink project. Specific training documents and schedules are available online. Teachers were provided with personal laptop computers, space on a UNIX server and access to the Internet.