In fact, schools do not *teach* students anything in the IT area.
Rather, they
*train* them to use specific software on specific hardware. I remember a
friend learning word-processing - rather than teaching the principles of
formatting, and making the students *think* about what they wanted to do, the
entire format of all lessons revolved around teaching them "Put your cursor
here, select the <menu> and then select <menu_item>...". never any references
to either toolbar icons or keyboard shortcuts. Such a procedure is
not, by any
stretch of the imagination (or the language) "teaching". It is pure
and simple
"training".
May I give a plug for my learning materials made available through the
Documentation Project?
http://documentation.openoffice.org/conceptualguide/
When I was creating these lessons, I really tried to design the
lessons so that the students focus on the task at hand rather than
learning a specific software application by rote memory. In fact, I
often tell instructors that my lessons are designed so that students
should be able to carry over these skills to any office productivity
application; it's just that I decided to choose OpenOffice.org as my
tool of choice for these lessons. OpenOffice.org is an excellent
choice for educational institutions and home school learning alike,
due to the reasons I outline in my Impress slide presentations, also
available at the link above.
In fact, I had a large organization from New Zealand contact me within
the last couple of days, inquiring about my learning materials and the
possible adoption of OpenOffice.org.
I find it very encouraging that more and more schools are finding out
about OpenOffice.org and its benefits in a learning environment. I am
detailing these in a series of articles made available on the
OpenOffice.org Marketing Blog (http://ooomarketing.blogspot.com/),
under the Education link.
There are a number of new articles to come, including some "Profile"
articles with educational institutions that have been extremely
gracious to give me an inside look into how they are using
OpenOffice.org so as to share their insights with other educators and
help them with their evaluation and possible adoption.
I also have quite a bit of new learning materials coming out very
soon, so keep an eye out at the Documentation Site
(http://documentation.openoffice.org/conceptualguide/) and my website
(http://www.gabrielgurley.com/).
Gabriel Gurley
Contributor, OpenOffice.org Documentation and Education Projects
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