As the computers were being placed in the schools, we continued to focus on helping teachers decide how to use them to support teaching and learning. As we know, "learning to use technologies is necessary but not sufficient. Too often, new technologies are simply being pasted onto old methods" (Foa, Johnson, and Schwab 1997). We set expectations for all the teachers to connect classroom practice far beyond using computers as rewards for students during free time.

We began in our first summer workshop by asking teachers to develop lesson plans, called Technology Action Plans (TAP), for which they selected a content or developmental area that they wanted to focus on in their classrooms, and then selected a software application to explore and integrate into this content area. The teachers worked on their plans over the school year in three phases, going from the exploration of software to teaching a lesson with technology. At the end of the school year, in May, they shared the result of that activity, not only via e-mail with the project team, but more importantly with each other in a full day inservice meeting with all four schools. In this second year, they are following the same three-phase process, but we are asking them to extend beyond a single activity to a whole unit or set of units. They still share their plans with us electronically at checkpoints throughout the year.