At 6:28 AM -1000 10/23/10, Glenn Grace wrote:
Hi Jim,
Aloha, from Hawaii. As you can see below, I have been asked to share our SeniorNet Mac class materials and Ideas with you. Attached you will find some of the materials (hand-outs) that I use to teach those classes.
Our classes are 2 hours per day for three days. So you get 6 hours of instruction in a week. This has been shown to work well here, although there are students who need more and we don't discourage them from repeating the class. For a year we were able to use a Mac lab at the UH and that worked really well. But with personnel changes at the university we lost that and moved our classes to a facility at the community college.
We are still a branch of the UH however. Here we have a class room and a projection machine. We have three Mac Minis which are furnished by my self and the director. Students without Macs are accepted for these three Macs and then that option is closed and other students with laptops are accepted. I often get about 7 or 8 in a session. Here at the community college we also have a lab with Windows PC's but that information will come from others.
My mac classes are divided into two kinds. I have a "Mac Basics" class and an iLife class. The basics class is for those people who get a Mac and don't have a clue as to how to use it. We have had people show up with a new Mac still in the box! I teach these classes with one assistant teacher who is as proficient as I am. While I explaining how to do something he is behind the students making sure that they are in the right place. In the ILife class I try to get them into photo management and editing and slides shows this is followed by IDVD so they can make a playable DVD. I also do iMovie if some of them have cameras and are interested. The last day is an introduction to Garage Band.
We get some students in these classes who are already good with their Macs and we are able to go deeper into into things. I try to remain flexible. But in the last year we are getting more students with little or no computer experience on the Mac side.
We did teach a one day class on iPods and that was a success. We will probably repeat it at some point. We will send out a bulletin next year to determine if there is enough interest to have an iPad class. I am looking foreword to that. It should be fun.
The attachments are in Open document format and were prepared in NeoOffice which is free on the internet. Please feel free to use them any way you wish.
If you have specific questions you can reply to this email. I hope this material is helpful.
Aloha, Glenn Grace
