Look I know it sounds a little trite, but you’ll hear it bandied about all over the place… ‘It is our job to teach our students to use software that hasn’t been invented yet’. So how do we do it?

I like the idea of ‘transfer learning’ and ‘problem solving’. I often demonstrate a process in one piece of software and then set the task in another. This way the students have to solve problems based on previous knowledge, guessing & checking and by transfering skills from one interface to another. The easiest way to do this is to demonstrate a task in Word and then set the assignment to be completed in Open Office or Google docs.

When cleaning up some old disks today I found a tutorial for using Excel for creating a graph.

I wonder how you might use this to encourage ‘transfer learning’?

Adrian