SMS3.4

Our class with the women's group in SydWest Multicultural Services was as engaging as ever. I'm unsure what it is about this group - perhaps it is partly because I was told that many of them have minimal literacy and that it would be hard to teach them - but the classes have been really good until now and we have been using a range of resources to enhance their learning.

It is most definitely possible to teach women who have minimal literacy skills to do a number of different things on the computer. It is a matter of working around their skills and using appropriate tools. More importantly, they have the ability to teach you so much. Most of these women are exceptionally smart. Today, we did a simple typing and formatting excercise using the Bold, Italic and Underline functions. We also did some online quizzes, used the typing tutor application and used an application called checky to help them practise and improve their mouse handling.

There were two moments in this class which really made me sit back and realise just how intelligent these women really are. At one point, i was explaining the minimize button on the top of program windows. I asked them what it actually does. Fatma quickly responded with "Go Back". What she meant was that the window goes back to the task bar. This was a phrase that I had repeated many times when i taught them about the minimize button 2 weeks ago. It was such a delight to have her say those words back to me - and to say them in a way that was emphatic and clearly indicated she knew what it did.

The other interesting occurence during the class was when Gemeila clicked on a link on the online quiz we tried and found an entire list of quizzes - some of which were easier and better to use for the class. I had spent a good hour the previous evening looking for suitable quizzes and hadnt quite found what I wanted.

Class Hours: 2.0
Instructors: 2 (Geetha & Alice)
Participants: 7( Amal, Finda, Gemeila, Phoebe, Safia, Fatma, Almarina )
Course Handouts: 3 pp
Computers Used: 6