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14 June 2006
Folks! Computer question! Tonight, I'm teaching an 'Introduction to Windows' class. What should I include?
Lesson One: Where is Your Power Button?
Lesson Five: Proper Swear Words When Encountering the Blue Screen of Death
Lesson Eleven: How to Install Firefox So You Don't Have to Use Internet Explorer
How to turn the computer on, how to start a new Word document, how to save it so you'll find it again, how to go on the internet, how to search for something on the internet.
I'm making this list by making a list of all the things my mother does not know how to do.
Definitely some basic terms: what are "icons", "selecting" text, what is a "folder", a "menu", a "file", "taskbar". "desktop", what are "file extensions", "applications", etc.
Sometimes people call me for help, and the toughest thing is to communicate over the phone, when they don't know the lexicon. Trying to describe some of this stuff takes up 3/4 of the time.
Here's my Windows PC optimization program for finance professionals:
- Take away their keyboards and make them use shortcuts.
- Edit the the color scheme so that documents in Word and Excel have grey backgrounds.
- Under keyboard settings, set the repeat delay to the shortest setting and the repeat rate to the fastest setting
- Edit the registry so that autocomplete in the "open" dialog box is on
- Edit the registry to obliterate the paper clip helper
- Install firefox and create a customized search engine entry for SEC documents (so you can type a ticker in the search toolbar)
- Remove the F1 key from the keyboard (also think about removing the "insert" key and the "num lock" key)
- Save fancy Excel formatting macros in the excel start-up folder
Is this the very first class? I'd go with how to move and minimize the browser window.
Here where I work, this is the question I'm asked most often. We have two computers. One is mine and the other belongs to no one in particular. You wouldn't believe how often someone sitting at the other computer calls me over and wants to know what the x and - and + buttons in the corner of the browser window do, and how to move the browser from one spot to another, or just resize it. Everyone comes to me because they think I'm some kind of computer genius, because I know how to forward an email.
Where did I save my file?
New users will often click save, type in a name and click OK and then have no idea where in the file system they actually saved the file.
Are you trying to fit it all into one session, or will this material be spread out over multiple sessions? I'm thinking about segmenting and pacing the tasks.
Make a take away / handout as well. Give 'em the hand out at the beginning so that you can encourage people to practice and explore (ha!) along, rather than take a lot of extraneous notes. If they have the document from you they'll know what to add to it for themselves.
But you probably already are aware of all this! Have a good class.
I've done other computer classes before, but they've been more advanced than this one (Internet search strategies, resumes, that kinda thing). This is a one-session class, but later classes will build on it.
Give them a general idea of defragmenting the hard drive, but warn them not to go overboard. Also familiarize them with Windows Update, even if it's assumed such functionality's running automatically on their system at home.
Oh - shoe them how to locate programs with the Start Menu, and Search functions, as opposed to keeping a ton of shortcuts on the desktop. Teach them the ~1MB threshold: desktop images larger than that filesize can eat resources while Windows is loading, particularly on a hand-me-down system with little RAM. (Demonstrate as well the ups and downs of image compression!)
Thanks for all the suggestions. I used most of 'em, and everything went fairly well. Next month is a Publisher class, but, thankfully, I won't be teaching that one.
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