Orientation #5 - Final (Meet and Greet)

So, what happened to orientation #3 and #4?  Well to put it bluntly, I missed them.  Reasons aside, they were apparently orientated towards general teaching techniques and furtherer techniques aimed at training illiterate students how to read and write.

So its the final orientation, well not really the final orientation was the 4th meeting this is simply a meet and greet between the tutors and potential students.  The meeting started with a game of human bingo, and transitioned into a couple of speeches from the coordinators.  After this the group broke up, the tutors moved to meet the students while the UofT students and I finally met up with the coordinator.

Following the meeting, we finally figured out what we are here to do!  Apparently there is an IT class focused on getting its students into George Brown College.  How this program does this is teach the students various programs that George Brown requires of their students.  Now heres the kicker, those programs are the basic MS Word, Excel, and other similar programs!  Although understandably they require that you know most, if not all, functionality provided by these WYSIWYG editors.

Our purpose is to run lessons that focus on teaching these students various things, from how to type, to creating your own blog.  Whatever the students want to know we should provide them with the information.  Although, because this is in a group setting, we will only be teaching the things that gain a majority consensus in.  After talking to the coordinator and finding out more specific information we had decided that we would have everyone come in for the first day to meet the new students.  Then subsequent classes would be conducted on the following days:

Tuesday - Single UofT student (from 9:30am - 1:00pm)
Wednesday - another UofT student and I(from 9:30am - 1:00pm)
Thursday - Single UofT student(from 9:30am - 1:00pm)

Our students consist of people who are actively seeking help in the IT department(as they have of found this program and signed up for it) and do not have the technical expertise to learn what they want from online sources.  Which means that some of these people do not own their own computer, nor do they have an Internet connection.

We start next Tuesday, meanwhile we have to create our own lesson plan.  Making sure to carry over the lessons appropriately and assessing the students current technical levels.

can't wait!