In September 2021, Hope IT had a Basic Skills course for 15 students in Liberia, Africa, working with our partners at Liberia Renewal Ministries (LRM). We sent 3 laptops to Liberia, and these 15 students shared these 3 laptops, over 3 Saturday mornings. We taught basic skills like how to create a document, a spreadsheet, and simple Internet Searches, but this also included concepts like what is a cursor, and how to click and drag. These 15 students never touched a computer before.
On top of all that, one of our Hope IT students taught this course. There was a lot of preparation to do that, and it was all worth it. Hope IT wants our students to share their knowledge, and be leaders to help other kids. This was a perfect example, and we hope we can do more of this.
Our Leason plan for this course is below:
Hope IT-LRM-Basic Computer skills
Instructor’s guide:
If you like to model this course for your purposes, we used the below applications:
- Libre Office: This is an open-course application, and allows a user to create a document, spreadsheet, and a whole lot more. This was cost-effective to load on the laptops. We also loaded the English Dictionary, so spell checker would work.
- Simple typing applications: The students had to learn how to type, so these open-course typing tutors were helpful.
- Anti Virus: We used TotalAV, as we had to turn off the S-mode on these Windows laptops.
- We planned to cover how to create emails (Gmail) and send emails, but it was just too much content for the students to handle. If you like to see those lessons, check out Old/Alterative “Week 3” lessons in the lesson plans above.
