Getting ready for the second season of IT-classes for Immigrant Women

I would like to share some experience I have had recently with doing some volunteer community work, creating and running a computer class for Immigrant Women in Oslo.

Background
Last autumn my employer Steria had a vision of trying to help out in the local community by sharing some of the skills and resources the company possesses.
A local organization called the Church City Mission who does community work was contacted, and there were discussed different ways that the company might contribute.
The Church City Mission came up with the idea that we could hold computer classes for users of a center focusing on health and family-care they ran, with many immigrant women among the users.  
Many of whom are lacking basic computer skills.

An email was sent out to all Steria employees in Norway asking for people to contribute.
I decided to join in and see what this was all about.
At the first meeting with the volunteers I accepted the task of creating the class material, as well as holding the class for a group of Somali women (with an interpreter).
In parallel with this class we held classes in Arabic for Iraqi women and in Urdu for a group of Pakistani women, these classes where held by volunteer Steria employees who speak these languages.

All classes were held at the same time in different conference rooms at the Steria HQ in downtown Oslo. The classes were divided into three sessions, The first two (Basic Computer Use / Internet -use and Internet / e-mail use) where held with one week apart. We then had a intermission where the participants were given the opportunity to get a Steria-consultant home, for anything from support with getting internet working at home or practicing the new skills on their own PC. After this there was one last session where one part were repetition and one part in which  we discussed the experiences the users have had since the last session and helped out with what the participants found challenging.

Creating the class material was rather fun, and the most challenging part was to block out all the things people with basic computerskills take for granted, things we actually do more subconsciously  than consciously, and actually make sure I explained everything I would do, so that the users would be able to understand everything.

The Classes
We started out explaining the most important keyboard keys, like space, shift  and enter, and moved on to learn how to use the mouse, clicking, right-clicking and double-clicking.
We used mspaint to create a painting to rehearse clicking, but there are online tools as well.
The biggest lesson here is that this takes time– double-clicking is hard the first time!

We moved on by showing the Google site, which is a clean site without a lot of distracting and confusing stuff.
There we practiced writing short sentences in the search box, remembering spaces, capital letters and such.
We then moved on to search for a dentist in the area, remembering to explain and show the scroll bar on the right side of the browser window.
We continued to search for other things, like phone numbers and addresses and then some more searches using Google in the participants own language,
showing both the regionalized Google search sites and installing the Google task-bar so that we could use the “translate” function to translate Norwegian newspapers into Arabic and other languages.

The next session we did some repetition before we set up the participants with Gmail-accounts and practiced sending and receiving mail, and attaching the painting we created in the first session.
In the last session we did some more repetition, before we spent the rest of the day finding online news and entertainment sources in the women’s own language.

Home-help
The home-help offer was received with great enthusiasm and several of the women in all the classes signed up to have a consultant come to their home to fix and explain stuff.

Being able to come to the homes of these families and fix little issues, that had stopped them from using their computers and the Internet, was a great experience that I will never forget.

“Customer” feedback
The feedback we got from the participants through the Church City Mission contained a degree of gratitude that is almost embarrassing to repeat – the women felt empowered and skillful.
They had increased their positions both in their communities and families, and felt capable of paying their bills with online banking and communicating with schools and others though email.

They felt lifted out of isolation.

The success of the endeavor was noticed and appreciated by upper Steria management,  the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten also made a peace on the classes.

When we now are about to start with season two, many more Steria employees have volunteered to contribute.  
We have already decided the dates for season three to be held this autumn.

Just do it
This kind of projects are fun and rewarding and shows that it is possible, with relatively little effort, to make a real impact both on the lives of others and maybe on society as well?

If you are interested in trying to do something similar, make contact with a local volunteer organization that does community work, and ask what you and your company do to contribute.

Here two links you might find helpful in creating material for such a class:

This is a great online class teaching the basic skills for surfing and using email:
http://www.abcpc.no/english/index.html

Microsoft‘s help and & how-to has a lot of well explained tips (remember to use a windows version that the participants may have at home)
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/help