It was important to me to present my mom’s lessons in a logical, progressive manner. I was trying to remember what it was that made me the most motivated when I was learning computing. Of course! It was email. Communication is one of the basic human needs. Like most everyone else, I did whatever was required to learn to do email; that taught me to understand what a program is and most importantly, how to use help files.

It’s possible we didn’t configure the POP3 access into my mom’s computer, but that actually proved to be an asset. I taught her to pick up her email online with GMail, now she can pick up her mail from any computer. She understands the difference between checking her email online and checking it with her email client, KMail. It helps that we set her homepage to the Google search page, where she can click on Gmail, sign in and check her mail.

In one two-hour session, she learned to go to GMail, place the cursor in the form box, enter her email address and password, go to her Inbox, open her emails, reply and send. She learned to highlight, copy and paste from a document so that later she can learn to copy/paste relevant data from documents into forms.

We went to YouTube where I showed her around and experimented to see if I could play a video while talking to her on Skype. It worked for a few minutes, so I encouraged her to do the same thing. My computer froze up and I had a little trouble closing the programs, but it worked out. Her computer crashed..for the second time. Of course our Skype call was terminated, but I called her right back on the phone. If she keeps crashing, it’s no big deal, we can send her another CPU, everything else is working properly.

We closed the evening with a promise to make a date for the same time tomorrow.

The adventure continues…