Interim

I'm so excited; I finally got a new laptop after the flood in my house. It makes posting to the blog so much easier.

On Friday, 12/11, Samantha taught our 1st class. It was pretty crazy. As I expected we had way more material than we could cover. Everyone including Samantha and I were a little shell shocked after we went through practicing using Google Translate (including how to install it from scratch). Between the two of us we had made screen shot handouts in English and Spanish. Samantha said hte ladies really liked them. I had made them with 1 screen shot to a page, but after using them, I want to revise them so that English and Spanish are on the same page instead of having 2 separate handouts. I was constantly having to switch between the two.

Since much of the 1st lesson helped new computer users set up computer and internet protections for free, I thought we should cut out the part we weren't able to finish; however, Samantha again said we shouldn't change it since she felt the ladies really wanted to know how to find and use free internet software.

On Friday, 12/18, I was really ill so Samantha did a review of the previous week's material and helped the ladies practice installing and setting up virus protection software. Samantha said they seemed to enjoy it. She said she's pretty sure that they don't understand the difference between firewalls, filtering and virus protection. We talked about a fun way to try to help convey the difference and why each is important.

Everything has been very "hands on" since the beginning so I'm revising the 2nd class for after the holiday break so that there's more work that the ladies can actually do rather than just taking or having discussions.

We had originally planned to have the police come talk to the group; however, political and legal problems have come up (refer to House Bill 2008 references in earlier discussions). I think it would put the ladies in an uncomfortable position.

Tomorrow we plan to deliver Christmas goodies to the ladies.