One of the requirements of completing of Front Range's TESOL certificate program is creating a leadership project. Examples include tutoring programs, ESL cooking classes, and literacy outreach in the community. The instructors at Front Range give you free rein to be creative. This is both liberating and terrifying.
When the sky's the limit, I often find myself stuck in a loop of "analysis paralysis" until I get so tired that I make no choice at all.
At first, I thought I might do a series of interpretive writing classes for ESL students. This was based on an activity I tried out in one of my classes at Intercambio where I had students watch an episode of Mr. Bean (very physical comedy and little speaking) and then describe the events of the sketch in writing. But when students in my Saturday morning ESL class at Front Range mentioned that they were interested in computer skills, my program director, Kathy, suggested a computer basics class for ESL students.
It was a fantastic idea. Perfect. And... I found it incredibly intimidating. I worked daily on a computer for 18 years; I would say I am savvy with most everyday applications and functions, but I'm no tech support candidate. Would teaching computer skills be beyond my capabilities? Would it be an exciting challenge or a humbling indictment of my limitations?
I ran the idea past my regular co-teacher, Jaylene. Would she like to join me on this venture? She was game and took on the role of marketer, spreading the word through the Latino Chamber of Commerce, which is where our regular Saturday ESL students hear about our classes.
We decided to teach a four-class session. That way, we could introduce some basic skills, gauge interest in these classes, but wouldn't be committed to a long session if it turned out to be a dud.
Planning the curriculum hung like a sword of Damocles over my head while I finished up my last semester of the TESOL program. I didn't even know where to begin. What kinds of skills would the students come in with? Would there be wildly different levels of proficiency? Would we have some students who could barely turn on a computer and others who wanted to create an Excel spreadsheet?
Our aim was to serve the needs of the students, no matter where they were starting from. After contemplating creating lesson plans and materials for a huge range of computer skills, we remembered that we advertised our program as "basic" computer skills, after all. We would teach the basics instead of trying to teach, well, all the things. But in order to leave the door open to students who were a little more advanced, we would offer additional exercises that posed more of a challenge as needed.
One of my instructors, Kat, gave us copies of her digital literacy curriculum. It covered a much larger scope of skills and was meant for an entire semester, but it was a great source of inspiration and knowledge. An outline for our course began to take shape.
Jaylene put out a flyer with a QR code for interested students to register and answer a questionnaire. I was supposed to get an email whenever someone signed up, but as the days ticked by, I'd gotten no notifications. I worried no one was interested and we wouldn't have any students. We'd planned the first lesson a few weeks before class was to start, but I moved it to the back of my mind as it appeared our idea had flopped. Well, I thought, it was a good attempt.
Two days before class was to start, Jaylene messaged me. Did I know that we had 18 students signed up? I had a mild panic attack. I went from thinking tumbleweeds would blow through our classroom to now anticipating a very full class. The night before class, she messaged again. The number was up to 25. [gulp] A pit began to form in my stomach. I've never had a class that big AND for something that was a bit of an experiment. We really, really wanted to deliver something useful for these folks, but I worried it could be a failure with students walking away disappointed.
I showed up early on Day 1 and printed out enough copies for 25 students of each handout for class -- and there were a lot. Balancing a pile of documents on the way to the computer lab, I felt nervous and inadequate. My co-teacher always shows up cool as a cucumber, but I don't have her laid-back confidence. As students began to trickle in, the anxiety melted away. Seeing the friendly faces of new people who show up to learn puts me at ease, and I remember that they are probably just as nervous -- if not more so -- than me.
All told, by the time class began, we had seven students. My panic subsided. Seven, we could handle.
We started with some computer anatomy -- vocabulary for components like keyboard, monitor, mouse, left-click, right-click, etc. When it came to procedures, we started from the ground up: power up protocol, signing in, mousing, clicking, identifying and opening programs on a computer, then how to close programs, sign out, and safely power down. Students located and opened Word, brainstormed what use it could be in their lives, and practiced typing and formatting functions. Then they learned shortcuts for copy, cut, paste, select all, and find.
This gave us an opportunity to see where the students were proficiency-wise. With the exception of two students, starting with these basic procedures was the right decision. And we had "extra challenge" worksheets for the two who were more advanced.
The programs we used on the school computers were Microsoft-based, but we introduced the students to Google apps as a free alternative that was already accessible to them if they had Gmail, which most of them had. For the remainder of our session, we worked mainly in Microsoft but would remind students of the Google options.
On Day 2, we reviewed power-up and sign-in sequences, our vocabulary from Day 1, and more Word features. Students learned how to save their document to both the Documents folder and to OneDrive and what the difference is between the two. We also worked through saving as a PDF and the benefits for doing so. Near the end of class, we had just enough time to begin working on email skills: creating folders/labels, deleting old emails to free up space.
We moved into email attachments on Day 3. Students located their Word documents from last class and attached them to an email. We also led students through copying and saving an image from the internet and attaching it to an email. Finally, students copied a link and put it in the body of their email. Then they sent the email to themselves. We assessed knowledge of these procedures by asking the students to walk us through each sequence again -- how to find a document and what to click to attach it; how to copy and save an image and attach it; and how to copy a link.
We worked more with organizing emails: how to create folders/labels, establishing rules for sending emails directly to a folder, going through old emails to categorize or delete them, and how to empty the trash folder.
At the end of Day 3, we had enough time to introduce junk email. We asked the students about their experiences receiving unwanted or scam emails, how they identified them, and how they handled them in the past. We gave them some additional pointers and tips about recognizing and dealing with unwanted emails.
Day 4 was our final day of class. We showed students how to create calendar events and reminders and had them create entries of their own -- both a single entry and a recurring series. Then we moved into safe online searching and how to identify unsafe websites. A student had an excellent question about browsing while using public Wi-Fi, so we discussed what that means and what information would be safe or unsafe to search for in that case.
We left the remainder of class open to introduce either Excel/Google Sheets or PowerPoint/Google Slides as a way of giving a "preview" of what we could teach in a Session 2 at some point in the future. I had a tutorial sheet ready to go for Slides, which was my area of knowledge, and Jaylene created one for Excel, which is her area (and a program I still need to learn how to use). All the students chose Excel/Sheets as a program that would better serve them in their professional lives, and Jaylene demonstrated a simple numbers column and how to use add, average, minimum, and maximum functions.
We gave the students a quiz at the end of Day 4 to assess learning, and we also gave them an exit ticket and chatted with them on the way out of class. Response was positive.
We'd lost a few students over the weeks; our final "core group" was four. It's been my experience in other ESL classes that some dropoff is normal. Our four students indicated interest in future computer classes, and all have since shown up for our regular ESL class. The feedback was that the skills we taught were important and valuable, and they liked learning the English terminology for things they had been doing on their own on computers all along, but that we needed to slow down a bit when demonstrating procedures on the projector.
A project that started off as daunting and intimidating turned out to be a great challenge and a valuable community service. I also learned a lot along the way: Applications and functions I perform all the time in my working and personal life now had to be converted into easily digestible steps. Luckily, I love writing documentation and manuals, and this had the extra challenge of being targeted for English learners.
Here is a link to our class materials. Students got copies of all vocab and tutorial sheets so they could refer to them when working at home or at work.
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