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.
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That was great that your group was able to teach the senior citizens at Lowman Homes how to develop a document using OpenOffice.org. Many users are not familiar with Mac's versions of Microsoft Office. The anticipation of the group not understanding some of the things you were presenting was an effective way to help you keep them focused. I had an opportunity to view the video from the presentation and you all did a terrific job,
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