Teaching the Teachers

The teachers were very keen to have English lessons and computer lessons and so we decided on four days a week at 2 o’clock.  We started in the second week and had 8 or 9 teachers coming but as expected this died down to a hard core of 3 or 4 and then finally 3.  The trouble is, learning English is hard work.  Many of the teachers have young families and homes to run and people just have lives.  However, for them it is a brilliant opportunity to have three native English teachers on tap to practise their English and also being shown how to use a computer.  It was only for 5 weeks.  But still people are people and in the end the ones who were really motivated came and those who weren’t, didn’t.

The plan was (there is always a plan that doesn’t work out haha) that I would introduce some aspect of computing and then take 1/3 into the computer room to do practical stuff while 1/3 did some English and then the other third looked at an interactive power point that I had from my ICT teaching days.  The thing is, in the early stages you actually have no idea what people know and what they don’t know.  With the English, it is hard to tell whether they understand or not and their difficulty is with actually speaking or listening so there is quite a bit of adjustment that has to go on.  So combined with the irregular attendance we settled into an introduction on the practical side of word or power point and then half went to the computers with me and the other half stayed and did ‘English with Fran and Martin’.  Originally it was the other way round but neither of them could cope with the strain of lack of mouse control from the teachers!  “left-click, no, left-click, try again, move your mouse so you can see the little white arrow change, hover, left-click, that’s it no, again, you are right-clicking, left-click”  They were pulling their hair out and my expertise in trying to get a class of 30 though an ICT BTEC qualification came into its own.

In this way, they have learned how to make folders, create word documents, change the font, the colour, size, align text, use bold, underline, italics, insert wordart, shapes, pictures and clip art and apply special effects and crop.  Mouse control is a huge challenge as is cropping but they are a whole lot better after four weeks of lessons four times a week.  Highlighting is difficult and they left-click when they need to right-click (but Martin does that still!) They made a school newsletter!  (OK with a lot of help from me giving instructions!)  They have also been learning Power Point and made a presentation about themselves.  It was clear here that their English is very bad and so now we combine English and Computer lessons by looking at what they are going to type and making sure they are not just copying off the board (where have I heard that before?!) They have progressed!  They made an interactive quiz where you could choose from a menu which question you wanted to have which takes you to that question page and then depending on which multi-choice answer you  select, you will be taken to either a ‘Well Done’ or an ‘Oops try again’ page, then back to the original question menu.  At the moment they are working on a presentation of the School Olympics!

I have also shown them ‘how’ to type, how to position their fingers on the keyboard and which fingers to use to type quickly.  They now use their thumb to hit the space bar but the rest will come in time!

This weekend we are taking the die-hard three to the hotel so we can show them how to use email and search engines. One of the problems for them is that internet cafes are very expensive and therefore not possible for them.  But without knowing how to use computers (and they did not know what a keyboard was) they will never realise why they need to know.

The internet is a doorway to information and 97% of this information is in English.  Unless people are computer literate and can speak English to a high standard then they will not have access to this material.  We talk about the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor but there is also a widening gap between those who know and can use technology and those that can’t and when this is applied at a national level this has huge implications for third world countries who are going to be increasingly unable to bridge that gap.  Understanding how to use a computer and the internet is a brilliant start for people who want to be able to improve their economic situation.