This investigation is a multi-case study of three teachers at Woodvale Middle School, an institution that had recently initiated a laptop program in which each student was required to purchase a portable computer and each teacher was fumished with a portable computer.

Research on ubiquitous computing in schools has documented that teachers often change instructional practices over time when using technology with students and has further suggested that teachers' use of technology may play a role in their shifting toward more constructivist pedagogy. Our two-year study takes an ethnographic perspective in examnining how three middle school teachers learned to use technology in the context of a laptop computer program. The ways in which those teachers eventually integrated computers into classroom instruction were powerfully mediated by their interrelated belief systems about learners in their school, about what constituted '"good teaching" in the context of the institutional culture, and about the role of technology in students' lives. The condition of ubiquitous technology did not initiate teachers' movemnent toward constructivist instruction. Rather, the laptops were a catalyst that enabled one participant, who had a pre-existing dissatisfaction with teacher-centered practices, to transform her classroom through collaborative student work and project-based learning.

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