Teaching computer skills

I promised to write something about my work as well. At KYP, students can learn hotel and catering, tailoring and design, automechanics or autoelectrics. There are two intakes: one in July and another one in January. I teach computer skills to all of these students, and that forms the biggest part of my work.

The July intake had already had lessons with Maiju but with the January intake, I started from zero. With them, I started with Microsoft Word. With most of the July intake groups, we are going through absolute and relative cell references in Excel. It's my favourite topic, but apparently not so popular with the students.

I knew teaching computer skills would probably be difficult but the reality still succeeded in surprising me. I've more or less lived my whole life with computers starting from my brothers' Commodore 64 and Amiga 500. (Admittedly spending countless hours playing Stunt Car Racer didn't necessarily improve my computer skills that much.) Last years, I've spend most of my days in front of a computer and I consider myself pretty good at using Word and Excel. However, here most of my knowledge is absolutely useless.

From the January intake, most of the students had never before even seen a computer. I needed to start with how to hold a mouse. Now, I've also really seen how stupid the Windows user interface is. It takes from the students forever just to start Microsoft Word. ”Click on the Start-button and go to Programs. Then move right and go to Microsoft Office. No, don't move down, now you have to go back to Programs. Yes, you need to move first to right and only then down. Ok, now Microsoft Office, now move right and go to Microsoft Word. Oh no, now go back to Programs...” It doesn't obviously help that some of the mouses are not very good, making everything even more complex.

The students are usually enthusiastic about the computer lessons. Some of the classes are quite big, so I've divided them in smaller groups. With most of the groups, there are two students per computer, a bit depending on how many of the computers are working (there are five computers). Sometimes it's difficult to get all the students to use the computers equally. Another obvious problem is that most of the students have no possibility to use computers outside the classroom, so without repetition they easily forget things that were taught earlier. This is what makes teaching so difficult. It frustrates me to repeat things like using a shift key and therefore I feel often that I'm a bad and impatient teacher. Luckily, some of the groups get on really quickly, and find new functions on their own. (However, I don't understand why the students always find the most useless functions in Word and never the useful ones. I've seen several students finding how to change the font color to turqoise or using wordart but never one who would've figured out using styles or even bullets and numbering.)

Teaching Excel brings some additional problems. I try to come up with practical examples but apparently they are not always that practical for students. For example, I made them do some percentage calculations to demonstrate how to change number formats in Excel. I thought this was a great idea, but unfortunately, they either didn't remember how to calculate with percentages or just having a computer in front of them blocked completely their ability to do any kind of calculations. I've seen the same thing happening to some students in a technical university, so it shouldn't have really come as a surprise. Realizing that has hopefully improved my teaching.