Process
On four different occasions, I met with an English teacher to help design and build a web site for her high school creative writing class. She defined the content, while I planned and structured the instruction and practice. We met for 90 to 120 minutes at a time seated side by side with the teacher manipulating the mouse and keyboard. I wrote my notes immediately after each session.

Excerpts
Goal
Lucinda has an extensive collection of thought-provoking postcards she uses when she senses her students need fresh inspiration. She wanted this resource to be available for students beyond her classroom. Her goal was to create a web site containing these pictures, articles about writing, and eventually samples of student work.

Initial questions

• How can I put my postcards on the web?
• How and where do I begin?
• Can I do this?

Who is the learner?
Lucinda has taught English to high school girls for several years. The English department consists of a solid core of excellent teachers who have been reluctant, if not resistant, to integrating technology into their curriculum. Before June, she had used a computer primarily to enter grades, word process, and send email.

What motivates her learning?

• Social encouragement
• Classroom problem
• Financial compensation

Three things coincided to motivate her to try to solve a problem in her class with technology. Her friend, an art teacher, had already committed to working on a web page project and convinced Lucinda to join her. Lucinda also wanted to solve a problem well suited to a web-based solution. Finally, a trustee gives a stipend to encourage teachers to pursue summer technology projects, and Lucinda, a teacher living in Silicon Valley, found the additional income appealing.

Methodology
Prior to this project, Lucinda and I had a good, informal working relationship. She was motivated and interested in learning but as this process was quite new to her, I wanted it to be as comfortable as possible. I hoped to build on our established rapport, to understand her needs and to respond to her learning process. During our sessions, I paid close attention to her face, gestures, and language in an attempt to monitor her understanding, evaluate her level of frustration, and gage her interest.
She sat in front of the computer while I sat at her side coaching and encouraging her to ask questions. I asked questions designed to help me understand her goals, motivations, and understanding of technology. I worked with her to define and articulate her project and to make sure it developed in a way she found pleasing and useful.

We began each session by reviewing her work, marveling over her progress and the growth of her site, and talking about issues she had faced while she worked alone. She loved sharing her work to an appreciative and interested audience. After introducing a new idea, I encouraged her to practice and explore before moving on. I concluded each session by leaving her with a few ideas to explore and with a final opportunity for questions.

Lingering questions
Will she retain what she learned?
Lucinda seemed to enjoy using technology and was quite proud of her results. However, I am not convinced that she will continue to use her new skills. While she will continue to rely on some of her new confidence and new understandings of these technologies, if she does not practice her other skills, she will forget much of the specific work we did this summer. She seems to see web design as a supplement to her class but not integral to it so I would be surprised if she dedicated much time to it during a busy school year. Our success lay in helping her gain a better understanding of computer technology and opening her eyes to future possibilities.

Could aspects of this process be reproduced?
The social motivation seemed particularly important for her not only initially, but also as she continued to work on her project. Lucinda loved showing people what she had done. She often worked on her page with the art teacher. Even just sitting next to her as we tried to figure out the endless mysteries involved in web design seemed to help her concentrate and have confidence to experiment. This is an enjoyable though time-consuming model to teach technology. I cannot imagine a school or school district having the resources to reproduce this on a broader scale. However, it is critical to pay attention to this need for social motivation and support. Uses of in-house mentoring, each-one-teach-one and cooperative projects would enhance a more traditional model of training and learning.