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

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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.
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