By Ronilyn Rasmussen
This year Dawn and Lester decided to offer a computer class first hour for the Mini-School students. The first week was a little crazy with setting up the computers and getting everyone a disk and a computer to work on, but soon they got into the swing of things. Our class started out working on a program called “Typing Tutorial,” which has practice runs of letters and sentences. Next Dawn and Lester taught us how to use the Macs.
How will the computers benefit Mini-School? The computers benefit Mini-School very much. Most of us use them everyday for a variety of things. If we didn’t have the computers for Com-Mini-Cations, a lot of people wouldn’t have received the newspaper. It makes it a little easier on everyone and more organized. Mini-School uses the computers also for making the Student of the Week banners. If we didn’t have them, we’d have to go through all the trouble of writing them out. They wouldn’t be as nice as they are on the computers and to most people it means a lot to get to be Student of the Week.
The computers are also used in the process of the parent letters. There is always something sent out to the parents about the happenings of Mini-School— things like parent meetings, student progress reports and upcoming trips Mini-School is taking. Joanne, up in our office, types up all the trip forms that are given to the mainstream and Vo-tech teachers, the big school administration when we go on trips. So you can see we use the computers all the time for a variety of things.
What we are learning on the computers in Mini-School will help us out in the future with jobs for anything we need to do. Computers are soon going to be running everything we use. So you should take advantage of the computer classes while you are in school.
Dawn and Lester have done a lot to improve the computers in Mini-School this year. In an effort to continue to build our computer education, they have requested five new computers for Mini-School next year.