Technology resources and applications change so quickly, continuing staff development in technology resources and applications remains an essential condition. For training personal, what makes teacher training programs most effective in helping teachers get to higher stages of awareness about technology:
- Hands-on, integration emphasis: Technology integration skills cannot be learned by sitting passively in a classroom, listening to an instructor, or watching demonstrations. Participants must have an opportunity to navigate through a program and complete a set of steps to create a new product. The focus must be on how to use the technology resources in classrooms, rather than just technical skills.
- Training over time: Many schools are discovering that traditional models of staff development, particularly "one shot" in-service training for the entire faculty, are ineffective for teaching skills and for helping teachers develop methods to use computers as instructional tools. Technology in-service must be ongoing.
- Modeling, mentoring, and coaching: Instructors who model the use of technology in own teaching long have been acknowledged as the most effective teacher trainers. Research also indicated that one-to-one mentoring and coaching programs are effective for new teachers. Linking teachers to each other and to staff developers has also been shown to be effective for new teachers. Linking teachers each other and to staff developers has also been shown to be effective. Most teachers seem to learn computer skills through colleague interaction and information sharing.
- Post- training access: Teachers not only need adequate access to technology to accomplish training, they also need access after training to practice and use what they have learned.
