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?
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I attended the second training session on the internet. I agree with you about the generation differences but you kind of have to give them a break. Most of them are very eager to learn and I think the majority of the class completed all their assignments during the one I attended. On the other hand, I had to help a guy nearly the entire class period and he just never did get it by himself. I really have to give them a break though because most of these people have never touched a computer before these workshops and the ones who had, seemed to do pretty well at the one I attended.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Matt, it is disappointing to see that the older generation struggles with the simplest of tasks, and elementary students are doing way more advanced things. That has to be the biggest difference between generations. There are going to be those that "get it" and those who just do not "get it." Also, Brendon had a good point, most of the folks that we are going to be teaching probably have never done much with a computer or probably have not wanted to do much with one. For this reason we should cut them a break, this is all new stuff to them. So when we do our training projects we should be very patient and understanding that they do not understand what they will be doing, but hopefully at the end of the training sessions the folks at the Heritage will have a good basic knowledge of computers.
ReplyDeleteMatt, excellent resource! Thanks for sharing. I bookmarked using my Delicous account, of course. Dr. Keane
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