My brothers both like playing games on my computer. It is not like they are total idiots, they just don’t have any experience of working with Microsoft Office and other tools that are commonly used in schools and offices all over the world.
Well, unfortunately we do not have many computers in schools here in Pakistan. Even the private schools with larger computer labs rely on old teaching techniques. Students in Pakistan do not use a word processor.
My brother Kamran studied commerce at a local government college. Without attending a single class he was allowed to sit in the exams and he even managed to pass most tests. Now with no real education he is seeking a job. I am helping him find one but I fear that the same will happen to my other younger brother Aazib.
I visited a few computer institutes to check out if any one of them has some practical, real life oriented computer courses. They had courses, a huge list to choose from. But when I talked to the teachers it was quite obvious that they do not have the knowledge. They were not able teach macros, editing and implementing formulas in an spreadsheet and they had no idea how to give a taste of real life problems to their students so that they can be productive with the courses they attend. The sorry state of education in Pakistan.
Any ways, So I decided to teach my brothers on my own. I am going to find out tutorials from the web and design a course for them.
- Microsoft Office & Open Office
- Word processing
- Spreadsheets
- Presentations
- Corel Draw
- Freehand
- Adobe photoshop
- HTML, XHTML and CSS
- Internet crash course
There is one separate course for Kamran.
- Financial accounting
This blog is about this learning process. Finding the tutorials, working with them and posting results. I will be posting links to online teach yourself materials, posting the sample documents and initiating a discussion about how we can use Internet as a medium to learn new things and improve our own life and the lives of people around us.
