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hpr_transcripts/hpr1308.txt

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+Episode: 1308
+Title: HPR1308: Helping a New Computer User
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1308/hpr1308.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:18:07
+
+---
+
+3
+Credence, Hacker Public Radio listener, My name is Shane and I'm a computer instructor
+at a private career college in Niagara Falls, Ontario. I spent a good part of my
+work day showing people who have little or no computer experience how to use
+computers and I thought I'd record this episode to give you a tool to help
+somebody in your life. Maybe you've got a friend or family member that
+desperately needs some computer skills but you wanted to teach them with a
+minimum level of frustration. You want to decrease the frustration both for
+them and for yourself. So I'm going to talk with four different topics and you
+can break these topics down and talk about one topic every time you see them
+until you get through all four or you could just sit down with them for 45
+minutes or an hour and go over with them if they're willing to do that. I'm
+going to talk about hardware, things to do on the desktop with your operating
+system, my talk about file management and text entry. So first of all, hardware.
+You might be a computer professional or someone that's very text savvy because
+you're an HPR listener but realize that the person you're teaching might not
+realize that there's a button on the monitor to switch on and a button on the
+tower itself if they've got a desktop system like that. So just patiently let
+them know that there's two buttons they'll have to switch on in order to
+start their computer and they'll need to switch off all those buttons at the
+at the end if they if you want them to use the button to switch out their
+computer. At this point I might take a post note and draw the power symbol. The
+one that's on most power buttons just so they can start to look around the
+real world and see that symbol in different places maybe on cell phones or
+other places. What I do next is just have them look at the keyboard with you. They're
+probably used to a typewriter from a certain generation but they're probably
+confused by the other buttons that are on the keyboard. So draw their attention
+to a few key keys. Show them where the enter key is and tell them that is to make
+things happen to start things happening. Show them the escape key and tell them
+that that's the key to close things down or to get out of places that you are no
+longer interest in. Show them the shift key and tell them how that will help them
+capitalize things. Then show them the control key and the alternate key but
+don't explain them too much just show them where they are. Same thing for the
+Windows key or the special key whatever you want to call it show them where it
+is. Now the purpose of taking them away from the alphabet of keys and just
+showing them the other keys these other keys is to show them which keys you
+consider important and this helps demystify the whole process for them. There's
+so many different looking keys on the keyboard if you really think about it.
+Everything from punctuation marks that are barely used to the F1 keys to the
+home and the page keys things like that. It's all very mysterious but if you
+show them these key keys then it will demystify them for them and don't know
+which keys to pay attention to especially at the beginning. After that I would
+talk about the mouse. The way I talk about the mouse is that it's right the
+left button of the mouse as the action button and the right button as the
+option button. So describe it to them as action versus option. Tell them that the
+action button is the one that lets you do things move things open things and
+that the right button is for bringing up a menu so they can see more sophisticated
+options than that. If you want to open up a browser or a document at this point
+and show them what the scroll button does or the scroll wheel do that at this
+point. If they have peripherals hooked up to their computer just spend a few
+minutes talking about the peripherals and what they hope to do with them. This
+is a great time to bring up the fact that the three and one printer that they
+have can actually do something more than print in. If they're not familiar with
+scanning, blow their minds by telling them they could scan that photograph
+their mother or scan that poem or draw on their written a while ago and digitize
+it, put it in the computer. What you want to be doing throughout these
+lessons is related to something they personally want to do. Even if you're
+showing them how to do these things for work, put a personal reason in there so
+they won't be afraid to use the computer for something at home. Okay so we're
+discussed hardware. Now we're going to discuss the operating system just the
+piece of it that they need to know. Start off with talking about the icons on
+the desktop and show them how to move some icons around on the desktop to
+different positions. It might be surprised. It might know not know that was
+possible. You might get questions about why there are so many icons on the
+desktop and why there's so many mysterious ones that they never use or they
+don't even know the purpose of. On Windows, that's a good part of the lesson
+because with Windows you have that little graphic on the bottom left-hand
+corner of an icon, a little arrow in a white space and that's an
+indication that it's a shortcut and I tell my students that if they want to
+take those shortcuts away and delete those shortcuts they can because it
+doesn't actually delete a program just the picture. That's all it does. So once
+you get them not going to control, show them how they can clear up their desktop
+little bit and maybe make that background picture a bit more visible than it
+used to be. You're giving them a measure of control and they're starting to
+actually take control of their system. It's not as mysterious as it was. After that
+I would show them how to open up applications. So on Windows I'd show them the
+start button or if I ever had the privilege to teach somebody Linux or maybe
+Ubuntu like I use a home. I would show them how to use the launcher and how
+to or maybe even the heads of display and show them how to find the programs
+you're looking for. On some Windows systems you can even just hit the start
+button and start typing what you want and show them that as well. Now keep in
+mind through these lessons. At first you don't want to teach them how to do
+something. You just want to show them what's possible and then if something
+sticks in their mind they want to do later they can ask you about it and get
+further instruction later but at first you don't want to give them too much
+information. You don't want them to be trying to memorize or write down every
+step you're doing. At first you just want to give me a review. Okay get them to
+open up a program and get them to use the Windows controls. Show them what the
+X the square and the minus sign do and show them how to minimize a document or
+maximize a document or restore or restore something down and then bring it
+back and also show them how to grab the bar on the top of an application window
+and move that window around to different parts of the monitor and describe why
+you might want to do that. Describe how you might want to see two
+windows on the screen at the same time and just give them a review of that. Okay
+that's all I would do for the operating system at this point so so far we're
+discussed hardware and we're discussed the operating system just the parts that
+your student needs to know and now we're going on to the biggie. This is the
+difficult one file management. I started by computing life by using a Windows
+3.1 machine and the great thing about that was that anytime you're in a file
+folder you could see the file tree on the side that shows you which folders
+were connected to which folders and how they branch off into into other
+branches and that really gave me a good understanding of how file management
+works but for a student who's new to the computer this is this is mind-bending.
+It's really difficult to teach especially if somebody's never seen this
+before. So what you want to do is explain to them that folders are
+containers and the files are pieces of information. The way I talk about
+folders is I start out the lesson by asking them if they have a junk drawer
+yet they're home and I spend a couple minutes talking about what's in their
+junk drawer in their kitchen and what's in my junk drawer and then I describe the
+documents folder on the computer as being a junk drawer. I talk about how if
+you have a computer for a long time it gets filled up with lots of things and
+how if you have more than one person in the house using the computer it tends
+to get filled up with everybody's things and then I describe how wonderful it
+would be if I actually went to my junk drawer and started putting things in
+containers and filling my junk drawer with containers each with a specific
+purpose put all the elastic bands in one container all the broken pencils in
+another container etc and so what I tell them basically is that a folder is a
+way to organize your your documents folder into into different containers. Now
+you might want to wait to get into subfolders later but when you do talk about
+subfolders do everything you can to explain that well take a piece of paper and
+draw file folders with different sections in them take a file folder and put
+one file folder inside another file folder like physical file folders get like
+four or five and put one inside the other than another one inside that one and
+show them how these things can be nested. To show them how they can organize
+their files into subfolders just to make things more more findable for
+themselves and what you want to do is stress that the reason that your nest in
+file folders is to make things more useful to give yourself more control over
+your files. Okay at this point I want to teach them how to select files from a
+file folder so what I do I go to my flash drive and I would put on to their
+computer a folder in their documents folder I put a folder in there called
+junk folder and it's got half a maybe two dozen files that I don't really need
+anymore but I use those to help the student practice selecting things so I
+show them how they can select a single file with a single click. I show them I
+show them how to hold on the control key and click on several files if they
+want to select more than one. I show them how to click on a top file in a
+range hold down shift and click on a bottom file in a range and show them how
+that picks up the whole range of files. I show them how to click and hold with
+their mouse near a file and then draw a box around the files they want and I
+also show them a fifth method that control a method of selecting all the files in
+the folder and I might take a good amount of time with that let them practice it
+themselves maybe at some point write down these instructions just so they can
+take hold of these five different methods. They might ask why you're selected
+and you can explain that the computer needs to know exactly what files you're
+thinking about using or deleted or email or whatever you want to do with those
+files so tell them you have to select them to tell the computer exactly what
+files you want to use. At that point they're ready for moving files around. You
+could open a couple of folders and use drag and drop to show them how files will
+move from one folder to another and at this point if they're not tired out you
+can show them how to use the right click menu to cut and paste files. At this
+point they can start doing things like organizing their photographs, organizing
+their music, organizing their letters or drawings, whatever they have in their
+computer and at this point they're starting to have a lot more control over
+their files. They're able to choose folders to put their files into. I forgot
+something important. You should show them how to make new folders as well. Maybe
+it's a right click new new folder something like that and show them how to name
+the folder and that way they can start taking control over the containers they
+have inside their My Documents folder. Okay the last topic I wanted to talk
+about is text entry. I would open up a very simple word processor. Windows
+I would use notepad because it's very unsophisticated it doesn't even have
+toolbars and you just want to give your student an area to type out simple
+sentences. Today is Saturday. Today it rained. Yesterday it was sunny. I hope
+tomorrow is clear. Something like that. So once they have those sentences written
+down show them how to how to save the documents that they're written. Now people
+that even have just a little bit of experience with computers the first thing
+they think about when they're saving a file is the file name but tell them that
+the file name is not important. Tell them that the most important thing is the
+location. So show them how to get to one of the folders they created earlier and
+get them to check that that's the folder they're in and then move them onto the
+topic of saving of choosing a good file name. I use the illustration of the
+joke about what real estate agents consider the three important parts of
+selling property. And it's the first one is location the second one is
+location location. So I tell them that joke and I link that joke to this thing
+of savings so that every time they they save a document in the future they'll
+hear my voice in the rear saying location location location. So the first 10
+or 15 times you save a document with this person. Do that bring up the
+joke of the real estate agent and location location location and in the
+future they'll they'll have that in their mind hopefully. Okay once there's
+successfully saved files maybe a few dozen times you can move them onto a more
+sophisticated word processor one that actually has two bars and you can show
+them how to format text and how to cut and copy text. So show them how to select
+show them how to select a single sentence. Show them how to select a few
+sentences that are on different lines from each other. Show them how to select
+diagonally from the beginning of the first sentence to the end of the last
+sentence they wish to select.
+At this point you can show them how to use the emphasis buttons. Show them how
+to bold text how to italicize it and underline it and show them how to change
+the color of text as well and then you could talk about choosing fonts and
+choosing a font size. And at that point they're able to make things look
+radically different on their computer screen and hopefully this point they'll
+have a sense of empowerment that they can create a document and make it look
+the way they want it to look.
+At this point they have some things they can do with a computer and this is where
+I'd start teaching my students Microsoft Word or later on Microsoft Excel.
+Because the things have just learned. Hardware, operating system, basics, file
+management and text entry. These are things that they'll come back to throughout
+their computing lives. This will be the basis of everything they'll have to use.
+Okay, that's it. Thanks a lot for listening. I hope this is very helpful to you as
+you try to help somebody in your life and I'll talk to you later. Goodbye.
+You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio. Hacker Public Radio does
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