Email and Photo Classes Completed

Picture: Don Ditlevson, one of several volunteer instructors, helping three students in the March 2010 basic classes.

Spring has arrived. Two more winter computer classes for seniors finished this week. Email instructor, David Scherrey pressed the send button and his email students returned to their regular computers to practice sending emails and following good email etiquette. It's been fun to visit some of the classes and watching people learn new skills. That's always been one of the rewards of teaching, at any age level.

This writer may have overexposed the entire digital photography group, but talking with several students after the final class, they felt they knew more about uploading digital pictures to computers and more about working with photographs than they knew when the class started. I also felt I had overreached and tried to cover too much material this term. Thanks to the suggestions and ideas in conversations and on the evaluation forms, we'll now have a few months to mull over possible changes to go slower on the content and try to add more hands-on practice -- particularly for students who have just completed some of the basic classes.

While writing this blog post, I became aware that both of the above paragraphs mentioned the importance of practice.

When we were in high school, years ago for many of us, we were constantly going to "practice" after school. There was football practice, basketball practice, baseball practice, band practice, cheerleader practice. Some of us had to go to work and we practiced becoming good workers and later good managers. We had to practice to be better at anything we did.

Computer skills are learned and eventually mastered in a similar fashion. The instructors can "point the way" and show you where to find the help files, but sooner or later each student gets to go practice -- to check their emails daily and reply to emails they receive. Other students will hopefully move their digital pictures into their computer and use software on their computer to make their quick snapshots even better.

If we all get lucky, some of our students will combine what they learned in email and photo classes and practice sharing their pictures with others. If you keep practicing, you'll keep learning and getting better. That's one of the rewards students of any age can achieve and enjoy.

We're never too old that all of us can't learn even more....