See the see also section below for the Impress presentation that's shown during this class.

OpenOffice Writer is used to teach this class. OpenOffice Writer is designed much like the popular word processor Microsoft Word. This class is used to teach the following points:

• The basic user interface of Writer, such as menu bars, tool bars and keyboard shortcuts
• How to align text. For example, how to center the title of a document, and how to left-align the main content of their documents
• How to copy and paste text, which allows the user to easily move or copy sentences and paragraphs without having to re-type them
• How to save documents, and re-open them at a later time
• Printing and Page Preview to avoid wasting paper
• Using bullet-points and lists when presenting similar data (such as siblings' names, etc)

The class begins by showing a few fill-in-the-blank sentences on the projector screen. The students are then instructed to type these sentences in, and then fill in the blanks with their unique information. For example, My name is _, and I have ___ brothers and sisters.

The students are encouraged to use proper formatting during the class. Points that are stressed are:

• Using capital letters to begin a sentence
• Sentences end with a period
• Two spaces at the end of a sentence
• The title of a document should be centered

The “Undo” feature is an important concept that is taught. Many programs have an “Undo” feature with similar functionality and Control+Z is a widely accepted standard for undoing changes made to a document.

Printing is explained, but the students are told not to do it in the classroom since we don’t want to waste a lot of paper and toner on these assignments.

An end of class quiz is given aloud and candy is passed out as a reward for good behavior.

Text justification is taught and the students add a title and a “By:” line to their paragraph. Text formatting its taught (bold, italics, underline). Changing font and font size is demonstrated.

Cut and paste is demonstrated as an important concept for all Linux/Windows applications. I think this is an important timesaver that should be really drilled in to the students. I teach both the mouse commands and the keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy , and paste. I have the students move a sentence around in their story and I also demonstrate going out to the internet to copy text off a web page (usualy I demonstrate a scenario of needing to qutoe the “I Have a Dream” speech. So, I Google it and show them how to copy and paste it to their document, while briefly explaining the concept of plagiarism and how it needs to be avoided.

Spell check is explained. The students are taught how to spell check their work, as well as what to do if OpenOffice Writer puts a squiggly red line under a word.

Students are taught how to use numbering and bullet points to create lists of similar things. Students are asked to create a list of their favorite sports, musicians, etc. in either a bullet point or numbered list format.

There is usually a wide range of typing skills presented by the students. Some will finish typing the in a minute an others will take ten minutes or more. Encourage and help students that are struggling with typing. Try to discourage the fast typists from making changes to their documents. Perhaps we should encourage fast typists to show slow typists how they work?

Usually the fast typists will already know how to change colors, fonts, and formatting but these are all things we are going to try to do together. Many times, the students who complete their instructions will play around with the fonts/font sizes and background colors. Students should be taught how to restore their documents to normal mode by pressing Ctrl-A to select all, and then “Clear Formatting”.

L3-OpenOfficeWriter.odp