What New in Computers at GECDSB?

Working Smarter

With the move to Windows computers in school offices, a number of training sessions were designed by the Information Technology Department.  This training dealt, hands-on, with the basic skills of getting up to speed in Windows after years of developing Macintosh expertise.

Only so much, however, can be covered with such sessions.  While it is true that the best way to learn is to apply new skills, how can you use a skill that you don't know about yet?  I recently came across the following from author H.G. Wells.

"The World Brain" (1937), in which he offered the following thoughts about education (which some people are still saying 61 years later):--"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century -- for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.  " ... (A) new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage."

New technology requires new ways to learn.  Training sessions and workshops are a start.  Applied authentic tasks reinforce the learning.  Constant pushing of the envelope to do new things and better things keeps us from getting stagnant.  To help, ITS manager Rick Gelinas purchased a subscription to the Working Smarter Newsletter.  Twice a month, four page tutorials appear for Working Smarter On the Internet, with Excel 97, with Powerpoint, with Word 97, and with Windows 98. 

How do you get a copy?  It's easy.   Log onto the First Class system and head to the ALL STAFF conference.  In there, you'll find a folder entitled Windows 98 Training.  As new copies of the newsletter come along, Rick forwards them to this conference, attached to a message.

Just download the file and open it with Adobe Acrobat and you've got the latest newsletters.  If you enjoy paper copies, send them to a printer and file them away.  If you prefer to read and take it all in from your computer screen, Adobe Acrobat is the ideal program to use for this purpose.