Internet training sessions for students, teachers, and counselors at the summer Rural Girls in Science camp occurred during a time of technological transition for rural schools in the state of Washington. Many rural Washington schools achieved Internet access in the 1996 school year.
Training sessions for students, teachers, and counselors were scheduled throughout the camp. Teachers were split into two groups according to their school's current Internet access status. Teachers from schools with school-wide Internet access met in the first session. Teachers from schools that had limited or no previous access to the Internet met in the second session. The split sessions made it easier to address the different experience levels and specific networking concerns of each group. Counselors, because of their small group size, met together in one session. Separate counselor and teacher sessions made it possible to use examples that were relevant to the separate professional interests of the two groups. Training sessions for students were organized according to school groups in order to encourage students to work together in troubleshooting and mastering new computer skills.
In the new context of accessibility, net literacy became a primary goal for the 1996 training session. In addition to reviewing basic Internet communication skills that were taught at the 1995 session (electronic mail correspondence and electronic file transfers), in the 1996 session camp participants learned how material on the Internet is generated and organized. They then explored how to search for and identify relevant information.