Day 8 & 9

The powers that be have okayed the use of the class' certificates for their graduation ceremony. The certificates are fantastic and look great; considering that the class has only had two sessions on inserting pictures for a watermark and wordart. It's a week to go to graduation and the class is humming along. The lessons have been learnt, the emails and attachments sent, pictures have been inserted, certificates designed; decorated and printed, invitations sent out, $50 to be paid, computers to be packed and ready to be shipped to their new owners and last but not least graduation day; 8th December 2011 at 6pm with dignitaries in tow.

Day 7

Oh wow I'm back and looking at these fantastic certificate I am amazed. I hope the powers that be will allow us (the students) to use the certicates they have made instead of the computers in home typable template I was given. (waiting in anticipation). Some of the parents have come such a long way. From knowing nothing to being able to make a certificate in word, use word art, insert official logos, insert picture watermarks (woohoo), send pictures and logos to the back of text (fab), text wrap pictures and wordart, just to name a few.

Day 5 & 6

What excellent helpers I have. Reade and Tania, just awesome you two. They took over when I had an unexpected death (actuallly 2 deaths)in the family and were able to follow my session plans to a tee. Reade even had to contend with the atroscious weather, thunder, lightning, rain, hail, and wind; all the seasons in one hour. The hail was that bad that in some places here it was about an inch and a half thick. Well done Reade. The class was able to start their certificates of completion. I have seen these and they are fantastic (more critiquing). Thursday's session went well. Tania reckons that Shari was just too onto it and finished everything expected of her in a short while. Being the trooper that Shari is she just got on with doing other things and helping others. Thumbs up to you two and my crew of keen parents.

Day 4 Personal Profiles

Personal profiles; something I would hate to do, yet I get the class to make one, why you say, because I want them to use the skills they have been learning and I also want them to learn new skills like inserting photos into documents and being able to move those photos around. No easy task I must say. Most of the parents are so willing to get their photo taken by me. If I was one of them I would be fighting it tooth and nail, I can tell you. Most of the class is getting good at the simple things like saving, save as and using the keyboard more smarter (I hope this is from good teaching, LOL). We have three parents who are just so on to it that I am not sure if there is anything I can teach them. I hope I do them some justice. We had two new people join our group today; one a pro and a new teacher who is yet to find a job somewhere (anyone out there need a BT?) and a real newbie. When this woman came to me she told me that she knows nothing about computers. Welll I beg to differ, this woman is brilliant. Not only did she set up her email address, on Google, but she managed to send me an email and start her profile and insert a picture. Big ups for her. I don't think there was a language barrier there at all I say, or maybe it was because my brilliant assistant Tania was helping her. When the session finished this wonderful woman gave me a bar of chocolate mousse chocolate from Cadbury. How lucky could I be, not only did I need a boost to keep me going til I got home but it was such a lovely surprise for all concerned. Today in class our computers were all going and there was no hassles at all. Everyone just got on with the tasks at hand and as usual no complaints. One of our parents is so lovely that everything I say she just soaks it all up, so much so that she quickly finished her vocab document so she could get on and do her profile. However, she is not wearing her glasses and this is a shame because she would do well if she could see the keys properly. You remember the new lady I said was a teacher well she is helping the wonderful lady I spoke about previously with her vocab list (fantastic, teachers are so wonderful). One of our parents that started on Monday has already finished her profile and is now manipulating her photo. Did ou know that she wrote all her profile in te reo Maori, oh how wonderful. Well we only have about three weeks of sessions left before each and everyone of our students in class will graduate and get to take their computers home with them and start learning and teaching along side their children. I am so excited about this because I feel that computers are the way of the future for our children and that they learn more using them. Hopefully this is true, anyone have any ideas or thoughts?

Day Three

Day three and not all our problems are ironed out. Still four computers can't get internet (not sure what's happening there). Never mind we will make do and get it sorted. Let's start a computer jargon document I tell the class and before I can finish my sentence, they are already on to it. Great! This is easier than I thought. Jargon you know, is not that easy to get your head around. I explain to the class about .co, .com, .org etc and as I say .co some of them are literally typing dot co; not their fault just my way of explaining it. I assumed that everyone would just know that when I said "dot com" I actually meant .com. Well you know what they say about assumptions aye? Instructions are getting easier, the class is picking things up faster and my Monday helper is just so patient and explains everything better than I can. Did I let you all know that my Monday helper is different to my Thursday helper? Well yes they are different but kind of the same, they are both patient I have to say, a lot more than I am. It was probably what drew me to them in the first instance. Back to the objective of the day.....save and save as, for those of you who are not MSWord savvy, save is to save the document as it is and saving as is opening a document, changing it around and then "saving as" a different file name, in turn having your original document and another one with changes. Easy you say, well, not always, especially if you make changes to the original document and then push only save. This lot seem to have the knack of this already. They are even using some of the keyboard shortcuts we learnt from last week. ( I suppose like the saying goes, "practice makes perfect"). Now, I was thinking about a way get the class to send an attachment. I came up with a "reflection" type document. Great, that's it! So I got all the class to open a new document using "CTRL N" and saving it in their own file (previously made a minute ago) using CTRL S as "Reflection". Excellent idea it was too. Now how to insert it as an attachment to an email. Attaching files to Yahoo mail, not that simple if you're new to it (like me). Well done, all the Yahoomail users got it, just about instantaneously and the rest just fabulous. I open up my gmail account and sitting there waiting for me to open it up was Alice's email with attachment in under five minutes, wow. You are quick. Bret, well it goes without saying he is clever; even though at first he didn't know how to attach files, he just worked it out but I got the credit (how do you do that Willow?). What next?..........Aha! Saving all their files to usb. Easy they all do it in under a minute. Woohoo! 5.54pm....where did the time go? Oh well, Erueti does our karakia and wishes us god speed and we're off home. Can anyone tell me how to change the background and make it easy on the eye and eye catching?

Reflections from the last one or two sessions.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o4whpXyGzCw82HgkYbu6aJ3RzveeheyWB2dEBTAsHSE/edit

One of the parents working hard at attaching files to her email. Well done Maryann!

Day Two

Day two started with a new helper who will be with me every Mondays (Yay for Reade!) and my nine members who started last week. Right, we now have everyone with an email address. Everything set to go....no!. All my power points are working now and email seems to be working....no, email is not working. I got everyone to start a keyboards shortcuts document that they can add to at leisure while they are waiting for me to fix the problem. Good old or should I say young, Reade, talk about a problem-solver. He said to me "shall I go in the staff room and see if the cord is plugged in?" my reply "no it was working a minute ago, it may have just timed out". He went anyway, and wallah! it worked and you know what he did? Plugged the ethernet cord back in. Someone had used the internet access point and forgotten to plug our cord back in. Yay, now we can get onto what we need to do. Sending emails using to ,cc and bcc. Sounds all too confusing but really to and cc mean the same thing (send to whomevers email address you put in)and every Tom, Dick and Harry can see your email address, bcc however is not. To the unknowing it means blind carbon copy or whoever email addresses you put in here will not show up on everyone elses email. (good if you want to keep people's email addresses private). Saving to USB, now this could be a challenge.....wow! It was great, not a worry, no hassle, saving to usb a breeze. Anyone have any great experiences they want to share?

Day One

Well what I expected to happen this afternoon with our first day of training didn't happen; Instead, we started off with two vga cables short and two ethernet cables short ( I hope we'll have enough) and to top it off, three of the four power points in the room wouldn't work(what else could go wrong?).  Half an hour to go and still no sign of any parents turning up.......six minutes later and in walks two beautiful ladies ready to go.  I hope they didn't see the panic on my face when they saw me scurring around like a headless chook trying to find extension cords to rectify our little power problem.    Two more ladies and counting...one of our males (prepared with flask of tea in hand) turns up,  a mum and daughter arrive, and lastly, two more ladies (yay we've got eight ready to go).  Introductions, not my cup of tea really, try to avoid them at all costs, oh well can't be helped I suppose.  Here goes....well what came out wasn't an introduction it was more like a course outline and expectation.  Good that's done now.  Introductions, take two.....well that wasn't as bad as I had thought.  Great, everyone knows everyone elses name now.  In walks our last male, great.  First port of call, pre-test, or what? No need for tests, hands up will do.  We have got four computer beginners who seem keen to jump in head first and give it a go (I'm glad), so let's get going quick.  Oh no 4pm and where is my right hand woman? Ahhh here she is.  Email set up; should be a breeze to do.  Gmail, oh no not the easiest email to set up.  One of the men already has a gmail email (rhymes), the other mother has an email address too and one of our ladies.  One gmail account finally set up after all the failed attempts at typing in those ridiculous distored coloured letters that you have to input.  What is Google trying to do here? Keep out the humans or what? I think they don't want the beginning emailer to actually get their email accounts sorted.  Second email account set up, four to go.  What a nightmare! Our three ladies who are still struggling with those "distorted coloured letters" are starting to get frustrated, as am I.  Yay, one more email account sorted, but through Yahoomail.  Thank goodness for Yahoo; Google you have lost a customer due to those hideous hard to read "distored coloured letters".  Has anyone out in blogger land have any handy hints to help our last two ladies get their gmail email sorted, or have you had a similar experience you would like to share?