Planning Start!

So the planning process starts!

Using google docs, three other UofT Computer science students who were assigned to this group and I compiled our first ever lesson plan!

The idea was that for the first week we would focus on mingling with the students and assessing their technical skills through either games or simply by running through all the things we had planned to teach them.

First item on the list was to give the students a tour of MS office and XP, going through the standard features of MS office such as double spacing, page numbering, headers, footers, ect... and teaching them about some important things about the OS such as anti-virus' and finding the computer properties.

While planning these things out, we had discussions on what was "simple" to the students.  "Simple" things to us may be something completely alien to our students so we had to be careful about the material we had planned to teach.  MS office seemed like a good starting point because, according to the coordinator, the students had already been going through a crash course with MS.  So we decided that this would be a good starting point in assessing just how much each student has learned.  The anti-virus and computer properties section was thrown into the first day's lesson plan simply because we heard that there are people who do not own their own computer.  This meant that if and when they do obtain a computer, they would be at a loss on what to do.  So we decided that some basic knowledge on what everyone should have on a computer would be a good idea.

For the second day, we had planned to finish up the MS office assessment, and give the students the grand tour of the Internet.  This included blogging sites, social networking sites, game sites, and most importantly search engines(GOOGLE!).  We were not sure if the people in the program would already be well aware of these sites, but we deemed it better to just give them a tour and see what we could learn from it.

For the final day of the week we would assign homework(now we are really feeling like teachers!), and get them to work on a MS office assignment.  The topic and the depth of technical knowledge needed to complete this task would vary depending on what we learn from the assessments made in the first two days.

Each day will end with a reflection period, in which the students will write down their opinions on our lesson, and the material covered.  The could also suggest more of specific material if they wanted.  We would get them to do this VIA email, so as to allow them to start learning how to conduct formal emails.

Over all the planning process was fun, and hard.  We had to be very careful not to go overboard, and take into account the audience that we were teaching.  The biggest problem was that we had yet to meet with the students, so we were unable to gauge their technical abilities.