By John Laidler
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

MEDFORD - Schoolteachers in Medford and two neighboring cities, hoping to prepare a generation of workers for high-technology jobs in their communities, are learning how to bring the Internet into the classroom.

The teachers are participants in a program to better prepare future teachers to integrate technology into their instruction. To help mentor those future teachers, current teachers are learning the technology themselves, and how it can be used to shape new instructional approaches.

Under the program, teachers in Medford, Malden, and Everett receive training in how to use the computer, and in particular the Internet, as a classroom device. Working in multidisciplinary teams of four, the teachers develop lesson plans that are tailored to the Web.

The teachers provide information and questions that students can download from the Internet, as well as suggested Web sites for doing research. The students carry out projects on the computer.

Students at Tufts who are training to become teachers work closely with the classroom teachers to absorb the Web-based techniques.

On Thursday, teachers from all three cities will be demonstrating their Web-based skills and some of the 44 lesson plans they have developed. The event, to be held from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Andrews Middle School in Medford, is open to the public.

The program is a joint effort of Tri-City Technology Education Collaborative and Tufts University. The two partnered in 1999 and 2000 to apply successfully for $1.4 million in federal grant money.

The collaborative was created in 1999 by the school superintendents in Medford, Malden, and Everett, and the commission that runs TeleCom City, a telecommunications park that the three cities are developing.

Cynthia Fiducia, director of the collaborative, said a goal is to help ensure students from the three school districts receive the training they need to take advantage of the 7,500 new jobs expected to be generated by TeleCom City.

She said the creation of the collaborative was timely because the three cities were each launching school building programs. When those programs are complete in 2005, there will be 15 new schools in the three cities, all of them equipped with new technology.

All three cities "were in the same boat in building technology-infused schools and having teachers that weren't prepared to integrate the technology effectively into the curriculum. They needed additional training," Fiducia said.

Maureen Scala-Freeman, a teacher at the Andrews School who is participating in the program, said learning how to incorporate technology into the curriculum has been energizing.

"I've been teaching for 30 years," she said. "I think teachers in general kind of get stuck. I think a program like this helps teachers in general to feel comfortable with a new medium."

The program aims not only to train teachers in the use of the technology, but in how to apply it to develop new approaches to the curriculum. Teachers within each team try to collaborate so that their lesson plans expose students to a topic, for example the French Revolution, that cuts across a range of disciplines.

"It's teaching teachers to use new tools in new ways to enhance student learning," Fiducia said.

She said strengthening the technology skills of existing teachers will also help the teachers of the future.

"If you train student teachers to use technology and put them in a culture where technology isn't being used, they are not going to use it," she said. But she said by "changing the culture" of the schools to one that is receptive to technology, new teachers will be spurred to use it.