by Holly Marie Wright

Created on: May 04, 2009

I still remember the first time I trained a group of people that weren't from my genre. I was just an assistant at the time. The class was told to point the mouse at an icon on the screen. The person to my right picked the mouse up off the table and pointed it at the screen.

This was a defining point in my career when I knew that I wanted to help people understand the unknowns in their lives. I wanted to crack up laughing, but deep down I wanted to help this person understand that technology isn't that scary.

Lingo is often overlooked in the teaching of technology, make vocabulary a part of your class. I still learn new terminology every day.

Teach them how to break it but also how to fix it, and remind them to always back up their work.

The best way to teach those that haven't encountered pc's in their lives is to relate it to something they know.

Remember when your instructors explained pc memory to you by relating it to the library? Remember chemistry class when the lessons you took away the most from, were related to the items you cooked with? Remember physics when you learned the most from riding the roller coasters? Remember the class you hated most because the teacher could not explain what they were teaching. I hated calculus because the instructor made it so abstract, but then my best friend explained it in english and what it is used for in "real" life. She explained it in a way that I could understand.

Relate technology to cooking, automobile parts, the grocery store, growing a garden. Connect it to something they know. Teaching technology to those that are older than your self is no different than teaching any other subject.

The best instructors all know that a fundamental of teaching is finding a way to relate new material to something that the pupils already know about. One of my favorite history teachers related the western frontier to exploring outer space. They were both unknowns in their time and the people that are exploring them faced the same fears. We remembered the concepts because we could see them in our present lives.

Don't let technology be an unknown fear to anyone; help them tackle it in their own way using something they already know.

Don't make something sound difficult and scary; approach the basics and build from there. Remember to learn from those you are instructing, they may come up with great examples of how things relate to items already in their lives.

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