U-Blog 5

On Monday (March 23), our team conducted our training session in the computer lab of Heritage at Lowman Home. Our session was on the basics of OpenOffice.org Writer. The students attending were very cooperative and interested in what we had to present. The idea of our presentation of the information was more of a hands-on approach. In order to teach the basics of a word processor, we found it would be easier for them to learn through practice. We took these steps in presenting our material to the class:

1.) We had the class locate and open OpenOffice.org Writer on their desktop/Start menus.
2.) We had the students compile a basic document on their knowledge of computers. This ended up being about 2 or 3 sentences per person.
3.) We then taught the students how to Save their file in the 'My Documents' folder and give their document a unique name.
4.) The last step in this training session was to teach the students how to locate their document and open it back up for further editing.

All in all, our session went very smooth. The students were very cooperative and eager to learn. Although I enjoyed presenting our training session, I am happy to get it over with so I can focus more on the rest of my assignments.

U-Blog 4

Last week I attended a training session at the Heritage at Lowman Home (Wednesday, February 25th). The training session dealed with the basics of emailing. The instructors handed out packets to each student and their first assignment was to create an email account. After this task was completed, they were required to send an email to another person in the class. Once that email was received, the students would then reply with another email that contained an attachment.

Some of the things I noticed during this training session was the fact that the older generation are all very eager to learn how to operate smoothly on a computer and use it to their advantage, yet some had the inability to 'get it', if you will. All in all, I left with a dissapointing feeling that the elder generation were not able to learn these basic ideas while there are elementary aged kids who are able to setting up MySpace accounts, downloading music, playing games online, etc. This goes to show you the difference that generations make.

My team will be putting on a training session at the Heritage at Lowman Home as well. Our session will include the basics of OpenOffice.org Writer. I found an interesting site which depicts what Microsoft Office is able to do that OpenOffice.org cannot, and vice versa. This page can be found at http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/software/page4765.cfm. Who would have thought that this free software had as many perks as it does?