College Course – Intro To Computers
All through college I kept Special Education as my major. I decided to be a coach and to be a coach I had to be a teacher. The best way for me to get a teaching job was to go into Special Education (As much as I would rather had been a gym teacher.). I don’t remember if the Intro To Computers was part of my major or an elective. It was offered through the Elementary Education Department.
Had a good professor who was pretty interested in computers but not in a techno-geeky way. His passion was probably more for teaching and computers were an interest. He actually tried to teach. There was a concern that the student learned something and were not being put up to a test. I didn’t realize how competitive a real computer class would be like those in the Computer Science Departments. We leanred to operate and evaluate software. The Apple II (With some letter version ‘c’ or ‘e’. I wasn’t much a hardware guy back then either) was the computers of choice for education back in the early 80′s. They came with dual 5.5″ floppy drives. I think I put every file I ever created on one disk.
Some of the educational software had game components that were a reward for doing the lesson. One key point we learned was not to create any visual or auditory reward for getting an answer wrong. We might think that the kids wouldn’t want to see their plan crash due to a failure to calculate a math problem, but if you make the plan crash look too cool, they’ll get the problem wrong on purpose. This is where I also discovered the word processor. I think this device saved my educational career and actually has led to my love of writing.
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