How to help someone use a computer

"How to help someone use a computer" is a very resourceful article that gives useful advice on how educators can help their students with their computers and/or laptops. One piece of advice stuck out to me more than others because I was able to relate to how this student may feel if this was to happen. It states "they might be afraid that you're going to blame them for the problem. When we first started using laptops in the classroom in seventh grade, if I asked this certain teacher a question because I was stuck, they would come over to my computer and say something along the lines of "well you should not have clicked that and you shoudld do it this way." When a teacher said something similar to this, it made me feel like I could not do anything myself, and that there was only one right way to go about performing the task on the laptop. I will definitely keep in mind that I should not blame them right out of the for a technical difficulty on their laptop. Another thing that I am going to "have to tell myself" is "your primary goal is not to solve their problem. HYour primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problems on their own. So it's okay if they take notes." I have a habit of going to help someone and then just fixing it for them myself because I know exactly how to do it. For example, if my fourteen year old sister is at home on her laptop and needs help with a powerpoint presentation, she will ask me how to do something, and I will just quickly do it for her, assuming she caught everything that I just did. I need to remember to walk the student through exactly how to go about fixing the issue that they have. One important rule that really caught my attention was "tell them to really read the messages, such as errors, that the computer generates." I have a bad habit of seeing something pop up and either pressing ok, cancel or the x button. I need to emphasize how important it is to read the messages so you know exactly what you are saying ok, cancel or x button to, otherwise you could unintentionally temporarily mess up your laptop!

This article will be very useful when going about working on our group projects revolving around technology in the classroom. The article gives many useful facts that we can incorporate in our presentation by giving specific examples of different facts and advice that the article offered.