I spent a few hours yesterday looking at www.gcflearnfree.org and will try to look around a little more later this week.
What a great resource for people with low information literacy. The site is very current, with tutorials for Windows Vista and other more recent releases. They also offer virtual classes that people can take, although I didn’t look too closely at how those work.
I thought the site was well-organized, and very user-friendly. One of the pros may also be a con: the computer tutorials were somewhat static, although they do use videos to add a personal feel to the lessons. I was expecting to find learning objects that were interactive, using software like Adobe Captivate to simulate and demonstrate computer lessons. Maybe it’s a funding issue.
I taught a class at CHPL this morning in Web Basics, and encouraged students to visit the site. People often ask for good books, but I think this may be a better resource than a Dummies or Idiot’s Guide book.
Today’s class was very small (3 people), which may be due to summer scheduling, or because we slightly changed the curriculum. But the people in the class were lovely, and were grateful. We talked about the difference between a browser, a search engine and spent quite a bit of time discussing the differences between Macs, Microsoft, IE7 and Firefox. We also spent time opening new tabs in the different browsers, and altered the size of the windows so we could look at both IE7 and Firefox simultaneously. I only meant to do that as an instructional tool, but manipulating the borders turned out to be a hit and we spent some time tweaking them.
Tomorrow, I’ll meet with my predecessor and go over some of the administrative details of the workshop series.
