U-blog 5

Monday this week was my team's training session at the Lowman home. Our task was to instruct senior students on the basic functions of OpenOffice.org's Writer application. To my surprise, the session went very smoothly.

I expected a crowd of senior citizens with little to no computer skills would be difficult to work with for various reasons. Computers tend to intimidate a lot of people who aren't very familiar with the way they work, so I expected that to be a major issue.

Luckily for me and the team, this issue might have come up once or twice, but was quickly and easily dealt with. The group of students we instructed were very focused and learned fairly quickly. The training went off without a hitch. There were at least three students I can recall that were ahead of the instruction the entire time, taking the opportunity to play with some of Writer's more advanced features.

Thinking back - and I'm not sure if a group has covered this topic or not - the biggest issue for us was that some of the students could not seem to get the hang of using a mouse and the concept of using it as a pointing device. I think that a session dealing with the various uses of the mouse and keyboard would have been a good starter point for the other workshops to build on. Stopping to show people how to move, click, right-click, select text, etc. was the slowest point in the training. With that said, it wasn't too big of an issue.

U-Blog 4

The upcoming training seminar is going to be a bit tricky. Not only are we dealing with inexperienced students, but they are elderly inexperienced people. The elderly tend to shy away from most things new and confusing. Computer software use isn't exactly very inviting.

Our team has a pretty good plan of approach, but it's going to take a lot of patience and finesse for things to go well and without too many hang-ups. We've designed a lesson plan to focus on some necessary main ideas, but we'll also include enough to keep moving should the class pick things up pretty quickly.

I've taught (or at least helped teach) two classes at the most, and each time went pretty alright. I won't say I didn't lose my patience every once in a while - because I did - but I didn't let it show through to the class. I hope it'll go that well or better this time.

It's a bit intimidating having a bunch of people at a class listening to you tell them how they aren't doing something right or don't know anything about a certain subject, and it's especially intimidating working with people who have lived your life 3x over or more.