Yesterday my mom’s tutoring session involved mostly fun stuff. She had just been on a short trip to Crystal River in Florida and was impressed once again with how beautiful the area is. I had her tell me about it, then said, “Wanna have some fun?” What was I thinking? Of course she was up for some fun.

I had her go to Google Maps and type in the location of the place she had been and she was thrilled. Remember seeing MapQuest or Google Maps for the first time? How about getting driving directions from your house to anywhere? Of course, everything she does makes her look in the right places for clues as to what she can do with that site. Describing how to use the scrollbar was exasperating on both ends. But that little hand that clenches and releases on the map was a perfect example of “drag and drop” and also taught her what I meant by “hold the left mouse button down and drag it around, then release”. When you’re dragging a map around to see what’s above and below, it’s downright fun.

We checked her email via GMail online, I showed her how to open, reply and close the program. The GMail interface is crowded and confusing, though. I’m going to have to get her set up with Thunderbird, it’s so easy to configure with a GMail account, perhaps she can do it. It has a simple, pleasing look, too, much better for a beginner.

OK, so we do have a real problem, her computer crashed after being on for 1 1/2 hours, the last time it was 2 1/2 hours. Time for her to call her computer guy. Don has a good idea what the problem is by its behavior; it’s probably the power supply. Mom says when it crashes, the back of the computer is very hot. She made the appointment, we called him and Don told him what kind of power supply to bring along, it would probably save him a trip.

The adventure continues…

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…

Well, we did it! Or more to the point, she did it. This morning my mom put together a computer desk, unpacked her boxes of computer hardware and this afternoon she called, ready to rock.

Here’s the set-up we sent her;

1. 1.3 GHz P4 with 384 MB of RAM, equipped with PCLinuxOS 2007
2. Mouse
3. Keyboard
4. Printer
5. 15″ LCD monitor
6. Headset
7. Headset/Speaker switch-box
8. Speakers
9. Router for sharing existing connection
10. UPS
11. Power distribution box

With no idea of the name of each component, she learned as she went along. On the phone, she got the whole system together, plugged her computer and my nephew’s into the router and… nothing happened. She looked at it as Don talked her through what should be plugged into what, spotted the mis-plugged power cord on her own, corrected the error and the whole works lit up like Christmas. Yeehaw!

I talked her through a basic understanding of PCLinuxOS, the various parts of the KDE desktop and had her open a tutorial (simple text file which I wrote) in KWrite on how to open some of the programs on her computer. Then I told her how to open the Skype program which was already configured with my Skype identity as a contact. After a couple of fumbled attempts, all of a sudden it worked. Now we could talk without paying long-distance charges. Spent the next hour-plus learning how to open her Firefox browser and use Google to search the web. This is a woman who didn’t know what a monitor was yesterday.

That’s my mom. I’m so proud of her. By the time we wrapped it up, she had brain burn. Tomorrow evening we’ll have another session. We couldn’t get her KMail program to pick up her mail, so I have to check the settings in her gMail account to see if we set it up for pop3 access.

She’s on her way to computer literacy and I’m thrilled. It’s been a wonderful day.

Don got a really nice dinner.