Just as we would never consider lecturing for an hour to composition students, we don't consider lecturing about teaching techniques in our training sessions. Rather, we build our training sessions around the kinds of activities we think teachers will ask students to do in the computer classroom. So instead of talking about a chat program, we have teachers use the chat program to explore its uses, advantages, and disadvantages. The trainer acts as the discussion moderator to keep the discussion moving along profitably and introducing new topics (e.g., when would you use chat with small groups instead of the entire class?) as appropriate. The trainer models the kinds of teaching practices that teachers often find themselves adopting in their first forays into the computer classroom.
