Mac OS X Training

[stromie952]

Hey all,

I am a student working at my school's computer lab and I am running a training session about Macs. At school, we have eMacs and all updated to 10.3.6. When I did this previously, I basically went through where things are located, how to force quit, key commands, where the power button is, etc. I am mainly looking at changing misconceptions about the Mac and showing the strengths of the system.

I would like to still cover that stuff, but I also want to put in an interactive element to make it more like a college workshop where they have a situation or a problem to fix and they do that by themselves or as a group without the trainer telling them how.

I am having some trouble coming up with that kind of interactive element. I figured asking here may be helpful because I know a lot of people here are teachers and altogether bright people. Also, any topics for training (one session of about an hour) would be appreciated.

Thanx in advance.

-Stromie

 

[MP2]

I agree, teach them all the key commands like force quitting, holding down the power button for 5 seconds after a kernel panic, how to reset the p-ram and nv-ram, firewire disk mode, holding the option key or 'c' key at startup. stuff like this

teach them how to install things like airport cards and ram. possibly take an emac apart (but be careful, a couple of techs at my school broke an emac when trying to take them apart, those emacs are a though nut to crack).

maybe teach them how to network several macs together, and several macs with xp, 2000 and 98. more

teach them some basic terminal commands like ls, top, cd, cat, ftp, ssh, telnet, emacs/vi/pico, kill, diskutil, drutil, man, open, etc.

teach them how to use applications like textedit, imovie, iphoto, garage band, itunes, mail, disk utility, appleworks/iworks, system preferences, microsoft office 2001/X, netinfo manager, etc. to their fullest extent.

as for problems....... just find a 5 year old kid and let him play around with an emac for a few hours. i'm sure you'll have plenty to deal with after that.

and most importantly, tell them that there are no such things as viruses (virii?), malware, spyware or trojans for the mac, and installing something like norton on a mac is not only useless, but dangerous. i've had many problems with norton for the mac.

 

[Mechcozmo]

iAgree with MP2, but iThink that you should tell them about permission repairing. And those aren't hard to mess up.

Just Get Info on a bunch of stuff and change the permissions around.

 

[wdlove]

MacAcademy offers a lot of CD's on many topic's. The one below is Panther, but they offer all the popular software titles.

http://www.macacademy.com/volumes/productpage.cfm