The Tricks Not Often Shown in Computer Class

When I teach an Introduction To Computer class I am teaching classes to students that are most often entering a college or university environment either for the first time or after many years away from a formal school. It is very important to first establish the reason that this particular class is being required of these students. Even though many students today have a computer at home and perhaps already have used Office products they are often not skilled at one or two of the set of programs in the group. The goal of an Introduction to Computers class is to be certain that every student knows enough about these programs so that they can be more productive in their "other" classes that they will be taking. They might be going into the field of nursing, nursing assistant, radiologist, lab technician, forensics, or a wide variety of other fields, but they will need to be able to word process documents, make spreadsheets, and make presentations with presentation programs. They will later in their career use a data base, but will less likely construct a data base, but they should learn enough about a data base to understand the abilities and reasons for their use.

Every location where I teach has a required textbook and syllabus. The syllabus tends to be somewhat general in nature and the textbook tends to be very large and very business oriented. There is a tendency for the textbooks to not cover the things students will need to know for effective use in their other classes. Textbooks do a pretty good job of the basics of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and data base, but because of the business trend in the material they significantly miss the applications that the students directly need.

For example students need:

Superscript and Subscript: The students that I work with will absolutely need to be proficient with superscript and subscript because they are very likely going to be typing chemical formulas into their documents. They must learn how to turn on these functions and how to turn them off so they do not continue typing in superscript after their superscript insertion.

Paint: Students must learn how to bring pictures into paint and modify them in a variety of ways, but also must know how to open up more than one paint program at the same time so they can copy pieces of things from one paint program and paint them into the other paint program. Depending on the version of paint they should know how the "crop" function would work to make the picture the size of the crop rather than leaving large blank areas in the saved picture. They must also know how to save the picture into different formats and how to identify the location of the save.

Print Screen: Students should know how to use the print screen function to capture a picture of the screen from the internet or from inside a program. The ability to capture a screen is often very important to them later when constructing presentations for their other classes.

Fonts: Students should become familiar with a wide variety of fonts, but they should become familiar with "Wingdings" or "Dingbats" and must learn that these fonts vary from version to version and that there are differences when using upper case or lower case letters and symbols on the keyboard.

Symbols: Student may have a need for the insertion of special symbols and this function is extremely important. The use of the copyright and trademark symbols are important, but in addition many other symbols are available for students to use. In many of my classes mathematical symbols may become important to students later.

Package: Students should become aware of the ability of a presentation program to be "packaged" and made available to others in a neat and complete packaged format that can be used on any compatible computer without that computer having the program itself on the computer. They must know that the presentation will play on such a computer but will not be able to be modified on such a computer. (Note: You may know of this as the old "Pack and Go" program.

Recording: Students should know that many presentation programs can use recordings and that they can even record their own voice and have it played back during a presentation program.

Buttons: Students should learn how to create and use buttons inside a presentation program. Without learning this function they do not get a significant understanding of the potential power of a presentation program. They should learn how to create typical buttons like forward, back, home etc. They should also learn how to create buttons that would move them into another presentation program or into some other program completely.

Control C and Control V: They should learn that the Control C is a controlled copy and that the Controlled V is a controlled paste and that the Control P is a controlled print. These functions can be really useful in many situations.

Insert and Overstrike: All students should learn about insert and overstrike mode through use of the "toggle function" of the insert key. I have had many students get stuck with this while typing and not understand why their computer was "eating" their words as they typed rather than inserting the new words.

Format and Text Wrapping: Students need to know how text wrapping affects an object like a picture and how format can be used to put a border around a picture and to adjust the picture in a variety of ways.

At some point in their use of the computer most students will need to do certain tasks: make a resume, make a flyer, make a map, make a presentation in a presentation program, type a report, use superscript and subscript, insert page numbers, make a table, make a spreadsheet, from a spreadsheet make a chart or graph, use a very basic data base, make a business card, label, calendar, greeting card or envelope, search the internet, use a search engine, email, create and open attachments, and save to and open from a memory stick. When the tasks we give students have use in their everyday life and in their future classes we give them the tools that make them eager to learn.