If your organization is offering digital skills classes, CTN can empower your staff and volunteers through training on the digital divide, adult learning principles, and other powerful tools that will help you best serve your clients.
“CTN has years of experience providing direct services [offering technology classes ourselves], and we’ve used it as a testing ground to learn from. We’ve put that knowledge into our capacity-building modules. Even the idea of Train the Trainer was first developed as an internal tool to make sure all of our trainers knew how to teach well,” says Josie Boyle, CTN’s Digital Equity Curriculum Manager.
One example of a challenge for which we prepare new teachers is having to simplify language in the classroom. “Our generation grew up with technology, and when technology comes quite naturally to someone, it can be hard for them to see what might be confusing to others,” says Boyle. “One thing that we include in our training are exercises that encourage people to try to describe something that, for them, might usually be so automatic that they don’t think about it. For example, ‘How do you double-click on a mouse?’ Many people might say, ‘You just click the mouse twice,’ but what is ‘click’? You have to be able to break down concepts for beginners.”
As part of our digitalLIFT Train the Trainer series, we offer two self-paced online courses.
- Teaching Digital Skills: Working with adult learners is very different from teaching children. In order to effectively teach your technology courses for adults, it’s important to learn some key learning principles taken from the field of education, including the learner-centered approach, the problem of expertise, the growth mindset, and the utility of mistakes.
- Teaching Digital Skills: Advanced: This class will help you take your technology teaching skills to the next level. First, you’ll learn how to ask questions to elicit learners’ underlying goals and motivations, the specific skills they need, and their current level of knowledge. You’ll also learn how to leverage the range of knowledge levels in group settings, identify and prepare for likely stumbling blocks for novice learners, and help learners to differentiate legitimate internet safety concerns from other unfounded worries.
You can sign up for one or both classes individually or enroll your team in the LIFT Trainers package, which will provide access to both the online courses and the ACP Overview, along with personalized advice, coaching, and support, as you develop your program. We’ll include a complimentary curriculum that you can use to teach your technology classes and connect you to a community of like-minded organizations and practitioners from across the country.
Boyle says she hasn’t come across any other programs like this.
“We’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback so far,” she says. “Many people have said they really enjoyed the section on adult learning principles. One woman who recently did the training is a professor with a rich background in education, and she said that we truly efficiently summed up the core principles in a manageable amount of materials.”
“Adult learning can get really academic really quick. We didn’t want this training to be overly theoretical. Our partners want to learn how to put the information into practice. I think we did a good job of hitting the balance between providing knowledge without making you feel like you’re reading 60 pages of information for a master’s degree in education.”
For more information on our Train the Trainer offerings, contact us at LIFT@communitytechnetwork.org.
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