For the past 30–45 days (July 26th to September 8th), I have been visiting St. Louis School for the Visually Impaired twice a week — teaching them “basics of computer usage”.
The experience has been interesting — lot of learning for me and some for the students.
Process
The time allotted was from 8:30 to 9:10 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On most days, it worked out more like 8:40 to 9:45 AM. There were days when we did not get access to the computer room since the office where the keys were kept was locked. So, on those days it was a “theory” class. Actually, to give a count — the students would have had about 4–5 hands on sessions of around 40–45 minutes since I started from end of July. (I had split the class into 2 groups — one on Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays so that everyone can get access to a machine. Hence 4–5 sessions for each child in those 7 weeks)
The “routine” for the first few sessions was that they would switch on the computers, then either start MS Word (or I will start MS Word for them) and then practice typing. I would encourage them to cycle through all the letters on the keyboard and hear NVDA say it back to them. The idea was to make them comfortable with the keyboard. Some of the students — PR, T, SR, PP, BM struggle with the keyboard. They have gotten better after a few classes itself. Imagine — just a few sessions of exposure to the keyboard has given them the confidence that it is not something alien. Few of the students who were more fluent with the keyboard were able to type out complete sentences. I would encourage them to type something about themselves or anything that they had spoken during their “Communicative English” class. At the start, the sessions were ad hoc since I wanted to get a handle of how the students interact with computers and what they know.
After a couple of sessions, I taught them how to open MS Word using the keyboard (Windows button → type W,O and then hit Enter twice). This was slow — because lot of students had trouble locating O and then backspace if they typed ‘I’ instead of O.
I also tried to teach them how to switch on the UPS and then the CPU. It was not imposed strictly as it would take a lot of time. That’s the thing — I have to be ready to do things the slow way — else the kids will not learn anything.
The last 3 sessions, I installed the a touch typing tutor that I had created and made the students use it. The idea was that they need to get fluent with the keyboard before they can get NVDA to work for them. The students were excited to use it. The students who had partial sight, probably were able to get more out of the app compared to the students who had no sight at all. More notes of that experiment can be found here.
There was the shortage of machines — we never had 12 working machines on a given day. H and MK rarely got chances to use the computers at all. And of course there are invariably tech glitches with headphones.
A lot of sessions ended up with me helping them copy files from one pen drive to another. It led to one session getting so delayed that it caught the attention of Brother leading to stricter time guidelines.
Observations
- As I mentioned briefly above — just the exposure to computers is making some of the students less afraid of it. Though they may not have learnt much in these 4–5 sessions apart from getting used to the keyboard.
- My plan so far has been to get them comfortable with the keyboard since NVDA (or any accessibility software) relies a lot on the knowledge of the keyboard. Since all students are at different levels with respect to their computer/keyboard proficiency, I will have to tailor my plan accordingly.
- The most important thing is that they still don’t know how to do basic functions on the computer — Copy/Cut-Paste, Browsing files, playing audio files, saving documents to a location etc, shutting down.
- Another common problem that I noticed was these students will stray into either the MS Word help popup or the application search window. The first one happens because they might have tapped F1, which brings up the help window — it’s a modal window, so they have no clue that their cursor has moved to a different position. In the second case, they would have hit the Windows button, they have not “processed” that they have moved to a different application and hence they continue typing and would end up typing in the search bar of the application search window.
- I have to find better ways of explaining what they are doing i.e.- explaining navigation on the computer is difficult. I have to do it without a visual metaphor. Also, explaining “Delete” vs “Backspace” was something that I failed miserably at. I just made them stick to Backspace.
- The sighted students are obviously at an advantage but couple of students — PK and V1 who don’t see the screen are really good at navigating using NVDA. It might be useful to understand how they have gotten proficient and translate that into action.
- The accent of the NVDA voice was definitely off putting at times. They could not understand the letter that was being typed.
- Being a first time teacher to a class of 12 students, I realized that individual attention is really difficult.
Next steps
- Set up a “individualized teaching plan” — what am I going to teach to whom and how do we execute it. Plan for smaller 30–35 minute sessions. It can cover basic computer functions and also usage of some softwares.
- I need to get fluent with using NVDA. There are times in the session were I would just “do” the things that the students asked for i.e. if they wanted to save the document somewhere, I would just do it for them — using the mouse. So, it was a great teaching opportunity that was missed. Basically ensuring that I know how to use the computer the way they do — using NVDA only.
- The above points also point out that I have to ensure that they learn NVDA.
- Leverage peer teaching — there are folks who have been exposed to computers more than the others. So, pair them up such that they can teach them.
- Work on the feedback/observations of the touch typing tutor experiment.
- Be patient and let the students struggle and learn themselves rather than solving it for them since it’s less time consuming.