4/13/04

During the past few days, I have had time to develop some Word projects according to the examples that Ronda, one of my former CLC instructors, had created. Here are the results.

4/16/04

Ronda had worked for an organization that supplied computer instruction for grade school students and wanted to teach the Microsoft Office Suite applications to the students who came to Study Club. I thougth that it might work best if the instruction were based on projects rather than on a "features and functions" approach. She came up with several projects that used Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The Word projects that she created included a story project, a newsletter project, and a brochure project. For the brochure project, she created an example of a finished product. Using a template was effective in helping the students to learn the application without having to start from scratch. Having an example of a final product was also helpful in giving the students a sense of what the project would look like when it was finished. In putting together my own Word projects, I made sure to have an example of a finished product as well as a template for the project. I added the specifications structure that I had develped for the Pipes Projects, which provided three levels of challenge so that students could apply what they had learned at the beginning level to produce projects that required a higher level of sophistication.