COMPUTER CLASS 2014

YOUR ROAD MAP INTO THE WORLD OF COMPUTING

Benjamin (Ben) Caruana

TERM 1 INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTERS
As undoubtedly you have heard many times before, you do not know because you haven’t been shown how. In this term we learn what makes up the computer and thus take the mystique away from that little box sitting on your desk and realising that you are the smart one and not the computer, because without you the computer is nothing more than a dumb terminal unable to do anything by itself.

At this entry point we need to learn the language needed to effectively communicate with the computer by navigating through and getting to know the keyboard and mouse functions, we then move onto getting a better understanding of data storage and computer memory, after which we learn how to navigate through windows, and we then move on to learning how to manage our work by creating, saving, copying, moving and deleting files and folders, and finally we enter the world of the internet where we learn a few basics that will set us up for Term 2 where we will enter the world of the internet in a more complete way.

 

TERM 2 – INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERNET

During this term we will journey into the unseen world which we know to be the internet and the World Wide Web.  As this is a slightly different world from basic computing we once again need to learn the appropriate language so that we can again communicate effectively, we do this by studying an in-depth glossary.  Along with the keyboard and mouse which we can now manage effectively, we need to master a few other tools to enable us to move in this unseen world, and that is why we need to get familiar with navigating windows and search engines. This is also the time to investigate the internet post office, email.  As we learnt when writing letters, there are specific rules that we should follow and hence we learn email etiquette. Of course we cannot venture into the internet wilderness without learning how to protect ourselves as there are some real nasties out there. As a special treat, the term is finalised by watching some educational videos that will hopefully make the internet a lot more understandable.

 

TERM 3 – INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT WORD

 

Now that we have the basics out of the way, it is time for us to venture into the software world of computing.  During this term we will learn the basics of the Microsoft Word software, as we navigate through margin paragraph, and page settings, font formatting, sizing, colouring, and type selection. We then move into other areas such as tables, page breaks, spelling, thesaurus, tabulation, adding clipart / pictures, and much more, finalising the term by visiting the different ribbons, discovering the content of each of the ribbons including the hidden items, and finally learning how and when the ribbon elements are best used.

 

TERM 4 – INTRODUCTION TO EXCEL

 

What a way to finish the year, in Term 3 we learnt the ABC and now we move on to learn 123. Those of you who know me know that this is my pet subject, and I especially like it as it is the only Microsoft product that can imitate all the other Microsoft products (with limitations).  I have designed this subject to provide those attending with a very good basic understanding of EXCEL, incorporating cell selection, row and column manipulation, formulas to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.  We will also cover in this course; conditional formatting, cell validation, data sorting, look-up tables, and data filtering.