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Go ON Manchester Diary (10th & 11th October)
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Thursday 10th October
We arrived at the Whitemoss Centre and were greeted by Colette. We discussed how we felt the programme was going, and any suggestions we had to improve the sessions. As it was Job Club, the centre was rather busy, with all the computers being used by people looking for jobs or improving their CVs. I helped a young girl apply for a job at Boots and helped her sign up to the Job Search website. She had limited computer skills, and required lots of help getting the online forms filled out. However, after some encouragement, and guidance, she was doing it by herself. We are starting to see lots of familiar faces, and their IT skills have definitely improved since last week .
Kimberley found herself helping the man who attended the go ON session last Friday. He had forgotten how to get onto the internet, so Kimberley went through the steps from opening the start menu to doing a Google search. She also wrote ‘step-by-step’ notes for him, so he can go to the library next week and use a computer on his own.
Friday 11th October
Today there was another computer session taking place at the centre, so since there were no people attending go ON campaign for the first hour, we helped with the computer session. The computer session is a 10 week long course to get people more confident using a computer, by gaining basic computer skills, such as typing and using Google. There were mixed abilities in the class, with some being excellent typists, while others struggled with the basics of typing words with accuracy. I spent half an hour with one of the men in the class, Joseph, who wanted help with using the Internet. Each attendee was provided with an instruction sheet, which they had to follow the instructions of. I helped him work through the sheet, which involved typing in URLs with www. /.com and also using Google search to find recipes online. Kimberley assisted two women with a Microsoft Word exercise where they were typing out the numbers 1-20.
After a quick tea break, I helped the women who were doing the Microsoft Word exercises- they had completed the text, and were editing their spelling mistakes. This took a long time, as they are still unfamiliar with the keyboard, so the arrow keys and backspace were very confusing. Just before leaving, a lady showed up to the centre asking about the go ON scheme, and wanted to know how to create posters for the Poppy appeal as she and her husband were organising fundraising events in the next few weeks. I asked her to come along to the next session, and hopefully we’ll quickly get her creating posters using Microsoft Publisher or Microsoft Word.
I’m finding the scheme so rewarding, and those who are returning each week are making such progress, and are so happy with their improvements!
