Being unemployed sucks, so when they offered me teach some night school classes twice a week (starting this week) I happily agreed, even if pay is less than being on social. But ok, that is not the problem here. I also have some experience as a teacher at local community college (web design and HTML) from decade ago, so no problem here either. I just need some general brainstorming how to do the job properly.
Course is free, paid by state (EU in this case, as I live on the wrong side of the ocean), but only those in 45 - 65 yo group with college education or lower can join this class. Employed or unemployed, it is completely voluntary, but I’d expect some firms might put some pressure to certain employees to go and take this class.
Class consists of 10 4 hour lessons with very vague directives (brief theory, Win basics, Office basics, Internet & Email use and that is it), so I have very open hands how to run things here. Size is limited to 15 tails per group (as there are 15 computers in a class). Individuals are pretested before and in my group are those who can hold a mouse, click on an icon and open an app or browser and ruggedly use Gmail (preferably on smartphone), but that is about it. Teaching material is a very short and bland script you could read in about 20 minutes.
At some point I got an idea. Why not teach them computer literacy from the point of smartphone user? At least partially? Looks like everyone has at least some knowledge of Android, and since smartphones are basically computers it might not be so ludicrous idea to take it from there and slowly upgrade knowledge towards classical PC using.
What do ya think? Am I slightly off here? Any other ideas? Some general tips also gratefully accepted.
As an aging Boomer who constantly has to talk through my even more aging sister through various computer issues, I say start with the desktop. It’s easier for old eye to read a monitor, it’s easier for shaky hands to use a full size keyboard and a mouse than type with their thumbs, and it’s easier for you to lean over the shoulders and gently show them what they need to do than if they’re trying to work on a 6" screen.
And as a general rule of thumb, find out what they want to do with their computers (or phones.) Use email? Social media? Shop? Run a home business? Focus on specific goals. Integrate functions wherever you can. Don’t just teach them to use MS Office Word. Teach them how to attach a Word document to email, and what they need to do to open an attachment sent to them.
Why the age discrimination? But, yes, sounds like you are not teaching Computer Science here, but how to use a computer as a tool to accomplish certain tasks. So, it would be good to specify those tasks before you begin.
NB the state must not be in the business of endorsing certain products (that is potentially scandalous); it’s OK to use MS Windows, but show how to click on the same things on Mac OS and Linux as well; if they need a word processor show them how to download LibreOffice rather than mandate they buy MS Office, etc. ISTM such flexibility also indirectly contributes to nebulous computer “literacy”.
Ah yes. Another catch here. I will not have permission to install anything on class computers including teacher’s. I could bring mine, but but … I’ve seen those machines (dated 2014). Win is upgraded to 10 and office is 2013, Firefox and Chrome, so that is the thing.
But they can install things on their smartphones …
Age discrimination is let we say, as I see it, political decision. True seniors have their own classes, but I do not know details. Younglings (I’m 45 myself) are supposed to know at least something or be able to learn something by themselves about computers. And uneducated boomer group is seen here as the vulnerable group in this case. It is a classic example of a targeted social program, obviously.
I’m sure even in antisocial(ist) America such things exist in some form or another.
Speaking as someone in your target age range, but also as one who is both computer and smartphone literate, I think that sounds like a great concept. However, you should first try to get a feel for how familiar and comfortable with smartphones your students actually are. Do they keep them on all the time and use them the way most younger people to, or do they just turn them on when they need to call roadside assistance?
That was (part of) the point of Solitaire and Minesweeper.
If the OP is finding some reluctance to engage at all, then I’ve found that Street View has a hell of a wow-factor for someone who hasn’t ever been online. Basics of search, mouse control, combined with prurient interest in some cases and basic curiosity in others.
Expect some dumb (to you) questions along the lines of why can’t or how do or what if that to you might seem obvious. Your teaching people from the generation that invented or developed…well basically all the tech we take for granted today. I’d say expect some sort of pushback but if they’re there taking the class maybe not.
What are the demographics of these people, besides age? Smartphones have been around for a while, so a lot of these people would have been relatively young when they got their first one. You think they haven’t used it except as a phone for 10 years?
You see ads for big simple phones, but they aren’t targeted to people 65 and under. Those phones are more useful for someone who has a problem hitting small keys on a screen. And those people are way over 65.
I’d say PCs are easier to start with since there is more room for menus and you don’t have to dive as deep to get to a selection. However, I’m in a critique group where I’m the second youngest person at 68, and no one has any problem using Word in reasonably sophisticated ways, let alone emails. My step-mother had no trouble using computers at 90, and my father-in-law only stopped composing music with a program when he couldn’t type anymore - at 99. I taught him how to program in Basic when he was 60.
In my experience what a lot of people don’t know is what is going on under the application level. Teach them what to do when something goes wrong.
I don’t think the average Facebook user is on Social Security yet, but it will happen soon.
I know you don’t make the rules, but IMO looking online for stuff you need, downloading and installing it (all without infecting the computer with nasty malware) is also pretty basic computer literacy. It seems rather essential.
You could bring your own machine, but I thought the idea is for everyone to try it out for themselves, so you would have to bring 20 or whatever…
Again, it depends what tasks the modules require. Eg searching for ECDL lists base modules like Computer Essentials, Online Essentials, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Theory: Wayback Machine
I think you’re probably off, depending on exactly what the people funding this were thinking. What you describe is a set of basic computer skills that absolutely everybody in a corporate or organizational setting should have, before any specialization. Not being able to do the things you list potentially excludes people from the job market. Phones, on the other hand, still don’t seem to be needed in the office world, despite everybody’s use of them throughout the day. There’s plenty you can do for the organization sitting at their desk with their networked computer, whereas there’s very little you need your cell for if you’re sitting at their desk working on their behalf.
Or am I misreading what the people paying for all this intend it to accomplish?
They probably haven’t used it except as a phone for 10 years- but there’s a big difference between using your smartphone to watch videos, use social media, shop and send informal emails and being able to use a tablet or computer to do any useful work. I know an awful lot of people between 45-65 who are perfectly capable of using their smartphones/computers for personal reasons, but who don’t know how to create a spreadsheet or attach a document to an email which is pretty much necessary for their jobs. In fact, a number of my husband’s outside sales coworkers had some trouble at work because rather than reading and responding to emails throughout the day, they waited until they got home and dictated their response to their similarly aged wives - it’s not just an age thing , I think some people just decide at some point they don’t want to learn something new. I mean, I have people at work who are asking me for the thousandth time how to do something who tell me they’re “too old to learn” - but I’m older than they are.
“Basics” to me starts with keyboarding. Not everybody in that age group learned how to type, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
There are little quirks to keyboarding, as well. Lower case “L” used to be substituted for the numerical “1.” The computer doesn’t recognize that substitution, and I spent my share of time tearing out my hair wondering what in the HELL I was doing wrong when the damned thing wouldn’t work!
Likewise, upper case “O” was a substitute for zero “0.”
There are characters on a keyboard that don’t appear on a standard typewriter keyboard. A code sheet can be handy for those just starting out.
And above all, folks need to know they cannot “break” anything. They won’t be able to launch WW3, or accelerate global warming. Mistakes can and will be made, and part of learning is recognizing mistakes and learning how to fix them.
~VOW
I’m a programmer, and own a smartphone. I think starting with Smartphones is a misrepresentation of what the class is for. Sure smartphones are computers, but that’s not likely what people are there for.
Another thing, are you prepared to teach half the class in iOS, and the other half in Android?
This too. It’s not magic. Get them used to navigating around. Move files, create folders and such. Do make note that there are some places that they should not touch.
I’m guessing the OP is in a country where “college” means “high school,” and that the idea is that this is a class restricted to people who do NOT have a university degree. I would also suggest this is a far more salient demographic characteristic than age, because 45-65 is not that old. About half the people in that age cohort are not Boomers at all, they’re Gen X. My parents, who are 73, are Boomers, and I can pretty much guarantee that they’d laugh in your face if you suggested they needed a computer literacy class, as they have spent most of their working lives using computers (and teaching other people how to use computers). However, if these are people who have limited exposure to computers because they used to have blue-collar jobs and are now trying to retrain for an office environment, THAT is probably a more relevant characteristic.
If this is the case, I agree with Napier – you should keep the focus on computers, not phones. It sounds like they already know how to do things with phones; what you want to teach them is the stuff that is different, not the stuff that’s the same. I’d also suggest using the first class to ask them what they want to learn, as well as assessing what they already know and don’t know by giving them some sort of practical pretest (for example: navigate to X website, copy and paste the first paragraph of text into a word processing program, type up another paragraph responding to it, double-space the whole document, save it in such-and-such a file format, and send it to the instructor as an e-mail attachment). Be sure to observe the room closely while all this is going on. You might be surprised at what gives them trouble and what doesn’t.
Many of us have had experiences where you could, more or less, “break” something while doing something quite innocent.
One I remember was when our factory first installed electromagnetic badge access, with the security system operated by a 286 PC. You had to use floppy disks to record the access records at the end of every day. One day our top engineer, who had to do this job because he was our top engineer and there weren’t corporate IT people, plugged in a floppy to download the records. Unfortunately the floppy was defective. The computer immediately crashed and locked all the doors so nobody could get in or out, and this was at about 5:00 PM. It was something like 45 minutes before he could figure out how to get it running and get the doors open again.
Another happened to me. I had a Sun workstation. This was around the time of the transition between BSD and SVR4 UNIX, with an X-Windows GUI. I wasn’t trying to use the computer, I was just putting a little cardboard box on my desk. Suddenly the workstation started going wild. Apparently, their version of Windows Explorer (whatever it was called) happened to be open, and the box caught a mouse button and dragged my user directory into one of its own subdirectories. At the time, there was no mechanism to keep you from trying to do that, you just had to know not to do something so unreasonable. Which of course the small cardboard box didn’t know. The machine started recursively copying files, directories, and nested levels of directories, deeper and deeper into themselves. It took me a few minutes to figure out why it was so busy and what had happened – and I think more than a week to undo all the damage.
And then there was the time I accidentally used a space character as the first character of a filename, which the system also did not prohibit, but which messed all sorts of things up. I couldn’t specify the file to change its name, etc etc.
Learning that you can “break” something was once a very reasonable thing to learn, and now it’s harder than you might think to unlearn. If they started making cars that would rescue themselves at the last moment if you try to swerve into a wall, you’d still have a hard time bringing yourself to try swerving into a wall.
Yeah. It seems to me that they can “break” something, in the form of getting a nasty virus, falling for a scam, or compromising their personal information.